


The Morning Doesn't Reach Us

by jennandblitz



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alcohol, Alternative Universe - Magical, Alternative Universe - Modern, Drinking, M/M, Non-Explicit Sexual Content, Recreational Drug Use, Typical Black Family Nastiness, modern magical au, use of unforgivables
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-01
Updated: 2019-11-01
Packaged: 2020-12-13 18:57:03
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 42,407
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21002564
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jennandblitz/pseuds/jennandblitz
Summary: Pureblood scion Sirius Black, raised and educated at home as all good Purebloods are, stumbles upon a wizarding nightclub called Destination. He’s never seen anything like what he sees that night at the club, and it turns his whole life upside down, in the best possible way.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Wolfstar Games 2019, Team Destination, prompt A26 - Quarter Past Midnight by Bastille. 
> 
> Thank you to all of Team Destination and my betas, confundedgryffindor and FivePips for all the feedback and encouragement. Also thanks to this fest I am now a big Bastille fan! I've made a playlist for this fic -- true to form, and you can check it out [here!](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/2y95CL3uxj0xjxIY7ZXFw8?si=Fm0iy8UfTpGPUs8XUAq8Fw)

Sirius stumbles out of 12 Grimmauld Place, clutching his wand with shaking fingers. His shoulder bounces off of the black wrought-iron fence and makes his head spin. His father’s words echo in his head as he starts down the road, stashing his wand in his sleeve and pulling his jacket closer around his stomach. _You had better start paying attention, boy, and stop acting up. This is what you were born to do and I will not tolerate anything else. Now, again._ His mother levelling her wand at him on his way up to his bedroom. _You are a _Black_, Sirius. We do not want things, we only do what we are asked._

It was easy to break the protective spells around the house. The spells to keep the house hidden and locked up were tuned to him, and although they were bound to disallow Sirius and Regulus out without explicit permission, Sirius has a useful knack for unweaving them just enough to let him through.

Really, it’s probably Sirius’ fault he’d been hit with a Stinging Jinx by his father, since he can’t keep his mouth shut. He doesn’t _want _to be doing any of this. He doesn’t agree with him, not since his Transfiguration tutor had sat across from him aged 11 and said _do you think it is your blood that casts your magic, or your mind? Concentrate, Sirius_. Not since she’d put him in touch with James Potter—another of her Transfiguration students—and said with a wry little smile Sirius didn’t understand until he was much older that they would get along _splendidly_.

James’ parents are wizards, but they aren’t part of the Sacred 28. James wears Muggle clothes and spends time with a half-blood called Peter and his parents seem _nice_. Sirius’ mother detests that and had put her foot down swiftly after she found out, but Mrs. McGonagall had convinced her to allow Sirius to keep up the correspondence, citing his better engagement in his studies. Perhaps it was because his mother didn’t want to lose Mrs. McGonagall as a tutor, too; she’s the best-renowned Transfiguration tutor in the whole of Britain and Walburga takes every opportunity to lord over Marion Bullstrode that _her_ children have to wait for the tutor when the Black boys had been taught by her for years. Maybe Mrs. McGonagall had put her foot down and _stood up_ to his mother—Sirius had actually hesitated before even _thinking_ that, wary that even ill thoughts (in the supposed sanctuary of his mind) about the Black matriarch might summon her wrath. In truth, Mrs. McGonagall is quite terrifying, but in a different way to his mother. Walburga Black is fear itself.

And really, it is his fault he’d had the Cruciatus Curse again. He had told his father that he doesn’t agree with any of this and he doesn’t _want _to be heir if it means believing in all of this _purist bullshit_. He just keeps running his mouth though, doesn’t he?

He’ll walk for a while. Maybe go to the marina of the boat club to watch the lights on the water, maybe feed the ducks on the Thames at Blackfriars. He’ll climb back through his bedroom window near sunrise and his parents will pretend nothing has happened and sit him back in that big high-backed chair and drill him with Arithmancy and everything it means to be an heir.

Sirius just walks, aimlessly. Left here, left again, straight, right, straight. The Cruciatus Curse leaves a sort of low-lying fog over his brain usually. He’s learnt to fumble through it until it dissipates, but it doesn’t make it easy. He can’t imagine James’ parents using Unforgivables on him, Mrs. Potter seems far too _nice_.

Further down the street a group of people spill out of a doorway wreathed in neon lights. One of the boys is pulling on a denim jacket with a crest emblazoned on the back. Sirius thinks it looks an awful lot like the Hogwarts crest, but that school has been closed down, the castle sinking into haunted antiquary long ago. Purebloods educate their children at home, and from what Sirius understands the half-bloods and mudbloods didn’t learn any real magic.

Sirius draws closer and shoves his hands in his pockets. “I like your jacket,” he says when he’s within earshot of the group. One of the girls has fire red hair and startling green eyes. They look up like a pack of animals. They aren’t Purebloods, he thinks, else he’d recognise the Fawley nose or the Rowle russet hair. Sirius’ insides twist at the idea of talking to this group. He feels at once like prey and predator and thrills with it. He wants more.

“Thanks. It’s vintage. Was my Da’s…” says the boy with the jacket, red-haired, tall and freckled, is he a Prewett? Prewett’s wouldn’t be out here like this, would they? The boy retrieves a cigarette from his pocket and lights it with a click of his fingers, the flame sprouting from between them. Sirius had been half-sure the group were wizards before, but now he knows. He sees a wand behind one boy’s ear now he looks closer, and another girl has hers in her hair, tucked safely behind the tie holding it in a ponytail. For some reason, Sirius hadn’t quite expected that half-bloods and mudbloods would have wands, but it seems stupid now because they _are_ wizards, aren’t they? And Mrs. McGonagall _had_ said to him _do you think it is your blood or your mind, Sirius?_ So clearly it isn’t all blood.

“Not seen you before,” another girl says, with a short crop of bleached blonde hair and a ring through her nose like a bull’s.

Sirius shrugs one shoulder, his eyes flickering over the group. “I’m… uh—”

“Oi, you lot.” A gruff voice comes from the neon doorway. Sirius’ eyes flickers over to see a man with an eyepatch and a grizzled face. “You coming back in or what? Can’t keep the door open forever.”

“Alright, alright, Moody,” the redhead says. She pops onto her toes to kiss the tall, freckled boy on the cheek. “See you later, Fab.”

Sirius is a little lost. Maybe he should just move on, but the girl with the blonde hair is looking at him. She smiles her stained-purple smile. “You should come in with us, new boy.”

Sirius looks above the doorway, where the grizzled man waits for them. 

_Destination_, the sign reads.

A destination feels like something he needs. He smiles and shrugs one shoulder again. He doesn’t know why he’s shrugging so much, his mother hits him with a Boiling Curse every time he does at home, but it seems like the kind of thing these people do. It’s this last thought of his mother and how much she would hate these people that pushes him to agree, despite knowing nothing of these people. Sirius has always been one to do first, then think. Maybe he needs to lean into that right now and just _do_. “Yeah, okay then.”

The blonde girl smiles and tucks her hand into the crook of his arm, squeezing a little before stepping over the threshold of the door. He feels nervous, but excited. His cells are spangling with this newness. The man closes the door behind them and Sirius gets an odd sucking sensation behind his navel. He stumbles a little—the blonde girl is in very high heels but she doesn’t so much as wobble—as they walk through a corridor, past a cloakroom and out into a large room.

As soon as Sirius steps through the doorway there’s a burst of sound like a silencing charm has stopped. He’s never heard music like this before; the floor reverberates beneath his feet and his head pounds with every thump. The room is _full_ of people, pressed together. Dancing, he supposes, but it looks nothing like the Viennese Waltz. He wants to clap his hands over his ears and stop the thrum of music through him that feels like the Imperius Curse but at the same time he feels _electrified _with it. These people and this place are so new it’s frightening but _wonderful_.

“I”m Marlene!” the blonde girl says in his ear, her lips pressed against it. “That’s Lily—” she points to the redheaded girl— “that’s Caradoc—” a boy with dark hair and dark eyes— “and that’s Benjy—” and a sandy blonde boy gesturing to someone over the crowd. When Sirius doesn’t say anything for a moment, she presses her mouth close again. “What’s your name?”

Sirius realises that no one here knows who he is. There’s an opportunity here, he thinks, to reinvent himself. He’s never had that before. Sirius Black, scion of the Noble and Most Ancient House of Black has been set in his ways since birth. Sirius (no last name)—no one else has given theirs—gets to be someone entirely different. He gets to _be someone_.

“Sirius,” he says with a smile, turning his head to speak into Marlene’s ear.

Marlene smiles her purple smile. “Nice to meet you, Sirius. You want a drink?”

“Sure.” Sirius hopes vaguely that she will order for him too. He can pay, of course, he has Galleons in his pocket, but he doesn’t think the bar has the elf-made wine he’s been brought up on. He follows Marlene through the throngs of people, trying not to just gawp at them, dancing, pressing together, kissing and… more. _Salazar_, Sirius has never seen anything like this but he loves it more than he’s ever thought it possible to love anything. Marlene leads the way in her sky-high heels, wiggling her hips as she goes. Sirius has never seen a girl like her before either, she’s all legs and short hair in a sort of pixie cut. Sirius reaches up and takes his hair out of the band at the nape of his neck, feeling it curl around his shoulders.

The bar is crammed and busy but Marlene winnows her way through to set her elbows on the counter. She draws the attention of the barman very quickly and leans over to order something that Sirius doesn’t catch. She smiles at Sirius and the ring in her nose glistens with iridescence in the light. Sirius has never seen a thing like that but now he wonders where else people have jewellery on their bodies.

Marlene slides three tiny glasses over to him and brings a matching three close to her body. The drinks seem to slide through the colour spectrum as Sirius studies them, dancing through clear through pink, green, yellow and turquoise back to clear again. Marlene nudges her elbow into Sirius’ side. Her eyes are very blue in the strobe lights, then red, blue, green, silver, purple, blue again, red, blue. “Cheers, Sirius.” She picks up a tiny glass between long nails and drinks it in one motion.

Sirius quickly follows suit. The drink burns his throat on the way down and his head swims. Sirius presses his side into the bar for stability as the world pitches around him. That stuff must be _strong_. He and Regulus have gotten a little drunk on wine at the awful banquets their mother throws, but there’s never anything like this. It must be a half-blood thing, he thinks. Marlene drinks her second, and third, and Sirius does the same. He tries not to cough at the way the drink settles and burns in the pit of his stomach.

“C’mon, Sirius,” Marlene says, pressing another larger drink, fizzing softly, into his hands. “Let’s go find the others.” She takes his free hand in hers and leads the way weaving through the crowds. The room swirls and feels immediately fuller with people and music, small in the heat. Some of the boys around them are shirtless against the closeness of the room, some of the girls in skimpy dresses or tops and Sirius tries not to stare but there’s _so much_ here and it’s all so new and fascinating and his head is just swimming, swimming. Sirius is bewildered, confused, electrified, but he’s never felt better because here he is _Sirius_ and not _Master Black, _or_ Boy_.

Marlene stops in a small gap in the crowds and Sirius sees Lily—her red hair is easy to spot—dancing along with some others. There’s a couple wound together and moving to the music and Sirius’ gaze lingers on them for a moment before he looks away. When he looks back to Marlene like she is his anchor, she has an arm around Lily. Lily taps her wand into her palm and Marlene plucks something that looks like candied orange peel out of Lily’s hand and pops it into her mouth. She seems to rise on her toes for a moment before she smiles placidly.

Sirius _tries_ not to stare, intrigued by everything, but Marlene sees him and grins. She glances to Lily. “Lils, this is Sirius.” Lily grins and waves, before tapping her palm and swallowing her own sweet. “Want one?” Marlene says, nodding to Lily’s palm where a few little orange sweets sit.

“Er… Yeah?” Sirius steps closer, running his free hand through his hair.

Lily smiles and holds her palm out, tapping the tip of her wand against one of the sweets. Immediately, the little thing starts floating out of Lily’s palm, feather-light, and Sirius’ eyes widen before Lily tuts and shouts, “Take it then!” over the sounds of music.

Sirius snatches the sweet out of the air above Lily’s palm, feeling it straining against his fingers with what _must_ be a Levitation Charm.

“Oh! Are we doing Levies?” One of the boys says—tall, dark, it’s Caradoc, Sirius thinks—and Lily smiles indulgently and taps her wand against another pastille. “You’re the best, flower,” Caradoc says, popping the sweet into his mouth and rising onto his toes for a moment as he swallows it.

Maybe Sirius _shouldn’t_ be accepting things off of strange half-bloods but that’s _exactly_ what he’s been brought up _not_ to do, so he does it. He swallows the sweet and feels it pull all the way down his throat until it sinks into his stomach and the feeling seems to spread out, floating and soft, as if nothing is worrying anymore. Sirius smiles blithely and sips the drink Marlene had pressed into his hand earlier. Everything is new but it’s so wonderful and his limbs feel lighter than air, as if nothing can touch him.

Lily slings an arm around his waist and pulls him into her and Sirius stumbles with her a little but goes with it. He supposes they’re dancing, moving their hips to the music and shimmying their shoulders. Sirius has danced ballroom with a girl before and kissed her on the cheek at the end of it but he doesn’t think that’s a thing here. He thinks this place will be more in-keeping with the time he kissed that Flint girl behind the curtains of the dining room at that Yule banquet, or the time the Carrow boy kissed _him_ in a wild fumble in a corridor that Sirius wonders if he’s dreamt to this day.

But really, it’s nothing like any of those things. Lily dances with him like all she wants is to dance, her hands on his forearms or taking his own hands. The Black signet ring is on his little finger, Sirius realises, but it’s blurry—everything is blurry—and he thinks Lily won’t notice or care.

This is _fun_, Sirius realises, the music pounding through him and the sweet he’d swallowed lifting him up and making everything just so light and carefree. Sirius has never felt carefree before, but he’s here and he _does_. Benjy and Marlene and Caradoc and some other people Sirius hasn’t been introduced to are dancing too and somehow Sirius ends up on the edge of their little throng, bopping away to the music. He looks around for a moment, eager to take in this building and all of its occupants, especially with the way the colours are swirling and dancing and shifting in his eyelids.

Sirius turns, his body moving to the music, blissful and floating, until a shoulder jabs into his and sends him stumbling but even stumbling doesn’t seem like a problem with the sweet in his stomach.

“Sorry!” The boy says over the music as Sirius turns, and Sirius looks up to see a wry smile, twisting at the edges, but it goes lax as the owner of it stares at Sirius a moment longer. Sirius stares, he’s never seen a smile like that either, heated and syrupy, with a white scar knicking over the pink of the top lip. Sirius licks his own lips subconsciously.

“It’s okay!” Sirius calls back, suddenly realising his hand is on the boy’s arm to steady them both and he is _very_ warm.

The boy stops and straightens a little—he’s nearly as tall as Sirius, only an inch shorter maybe—and lifts a hand to push a wild fringe of curls out of his eyes. The colours are shifting and spinning in Sirius’ gaze so he can’t quite tell what colour everything is—red, blue, green, silver, purple, blue again, red, blue—except his eyes. They are rings of almost-yellow amber around wide, yawning pupils. The boy cocks his head like an animal, endlessly curious, and blinks a few times before his eyes focus on Sirius.

Sirius opens his mouth to say something, feeling strung-up, floating, pulling higher and higher as if the boy’s hand on his arm is the only thing stopping him from floating away—had the spell taken effect again? Before he can force the syllables around his addled tongue, the boy grabs him by the forearm and pulls him into a space on the dance-floor, already moving his hips to the music.

If Sirius knew how to dance like this, he would feel a lot better, but at present he just sort of shuffles his shoulders. He had been looking around the crowds earlier to try and understand it better, but now he’s unable to tear his gaze from the boy in front of him, the endless space of his pupils, the odd, wry quirk of his mouth. The boy holds onto Sirius, one hand slipping down his arm to grasp at his wrist, the other going to the line of Sirius’ waist.

It takes a moment or two for Sirius to realise the boy isn’t _quite_ looking at him though. He’s strangely blurry, staring at the space just beyond his shoulder or focussing just short of Sirius’ nose. He wonders if the boy has had a spell similar to the one Sirius had swallowed, one that makes him light and carefree, like there is nothing wrong with the world when the weight of it is pressing on his shoulders. In a moment of uncanny lucidity through the lightness of the spell, Sirius wonders what this boy has on his shoulders. What is he escaping? 

_Destination_ feels like escape.

Sirius can’t look away though, he doesn’t want to escape from this boy. He’s… _entrancing_. He smiles placidly at Sirius, as if he does this often—dances with strangers and lures them in with amber-yellow eyes and the flick of a scar atop his lip that shines (red, blue, green, silver, purple, blue again, red, blue) with the lights. His eyes are sharp and deep, cutting like curses as if he can see through Sirius’ body into his soul, as if he is searching for something. Is this what dancing with a stranger is meant to be like? He’s never done it before, apart from forced ballroom steps with girls from other Pureblood families and his mother hissing in his ear _this is what we _do_, Sirius. We do not marry for love we marry because it is expected. You will behave. _

Sirius swallows and pushes that thought away. His mother is far from here. This place is escape, it is freedom. The boy is staring at him. The lights flash warm and yellow for a moment, as close to normality as possible in a place like this, between worlds, between expectations and realities, and the boy’s hair is a mousy brown, copper pangs sharding through curls. His skin is pale, but not in the same way Sirius’ is. Sirius’ complexion comes from his breeding, the bloodline of the Blacks and their assured English-ness. This boy looks like he has seen only moonlight for _years_. His eyes are still amber-yellow and piercing. Sirius feels like prey and predator all at once again, somehow, inexplicably.

The boy’s hands slide to Sirius’ waist as they move together and the crowd swirls and surges around them and presses them closer, closer, and Sirius suddenly feels breathless. He feels bewildered and undone, caught up in the endless swell of the people around him and this boy’s hands on his waist, pressing, pressing. It’s claustrophobic all of a sudden, close and dark, flashing colours—red, blue green, silver, purple, blue again, red, blue—and Sirius draws a shuddering breath.

Sirius takes a step back to try and gain some space but his boot catches on something behind him and he pitches back, losing his footing entirely, en route to land square on his arse and make an utter fool of himself. The crowd swarms around him, pushing between him and the boy, blocking Sirius’ view and filling his gaze with the dark press of bodies. Sirius expects the ground to roar up and meet him, for people to laugh around him perhaps; stupid, naive boy falling over, but the world shutters, there’s a sharp tug behind his navel and Sirius’ backside makes contact with—

A bench. Sirius opens his eyes like he’s blinking but he _can’t_ be, because he opens his eyes and he is on a park bench. He’s in Shoreditch Park, he recognises, and the beginning of the sunrise is licking at the edge of the trees. Sirius frowns and pushes a hand over his face. He was just at the club, wasn’t he? Dancing with that boy with his amber-yellow eyes and warm, _warm_ fingers. Was it the drinks? Was it Lily’s spells and the sweets or the dancing or that boy?

Sirius scrubs vigorously at his face and gingerly peels his fingers from his eyes as if he might re-materialise in the club. But he stays on the park bench, shivering in the pre-dawn. He only knows the past few hours have been real because of the taste of Marlene’s drink on his tongue and the phantom lightness from Lily’s sweets and an odd burning on his waist from that boy’s touch. He watches the sun rise for a few moments, the warm light crawling over the ground, inching towards his feet. He feels disconnected, as if his brain is not attached to his body. How could he be at the club one moment and here the next? Did the club kick him out?

Sirius’ mind whirs and spills. By the time the sunrise touches the tips of his boots and turns them orange and red Sirius has a plan. He’ll swing by the Owl Office on Upper Street and send James an owl—perhaps his friend has heard of this club? Then, he’ll go through his work with his father for the day—checking over the family estates and Arithmancy practice—and when night falls, Sirius will wind his way back to that neon-wreathed doorway and step through to freedom again. 


	2. Chapter 2

Sirius is outside the Owl Office when they open at 8am. He uses a piece of parchment from the counter at the back, the place where you pay by the inch when you get to the register, and addresses a brief note to the only person he has any business writing to.

_J. Potter,_

_Have you heard of a place called ‘Destination’? I happened on it last night. It's a nightclub, I think is the word. I think it's a half-blood place, but I've never seen anything like it. I think you would enjoy it there._

_I plan to go back tonight, it’s on Charterhouse Street. If you're free and able to come into London, don't reply, just meet me at the entrance to King’s Cross at 10pm. If you can't make it, reply with some inane bullshit. Mother will likely read your reply, that's why I'm sending this from the Owl Office._

_Hope to see you tonight._

_S. Black_

Sirius retrieves a Sickle from his pocket and pays for both the parchment and owl fare. The clerk, thankfully, is too tired to look at him properly else he might recognise him as Master Black—the boy whose mother came in her a month past and informed them that if they served either of the Black sons again they wouldn't open for another day’s business.

Sirius’ mother knows every moment of his life she can get her claws on. He has not so much as _breathed_ without her explicit consent since she dropped him into the world and he thinks she would often like to revoke his permission to breathe permanently, if it weren't for his value as the Black heir. She knew of his lacklustre courting of that Flint girl, and of that firework-filled dalliance with the Carrow boy—the first time Sirius received the Cruciatus Curse to squeeze the _sickness _out of him.

She knew of everything, until last night. Walburga Black does not know where her son was last night, Sirius is certain. How would she know? The sanctuary of the nightclub, the strobe lights and those Levitation Charm sweets are Sirius’ and Sirius’ alone. He will cling to those memories until he can create more.

Hands in his pockets but holding onto that residual lightness, Sirius walks down Upper Street and onto the small lane behind Grimmauld Place. Number 12 slides into existence between the buildings on each side, dark and austere. The walls around the garden are tall but Sirius utilises that residual floating feeling to scale one of the walls using the decorative brickwork. He drops into the vine-covered corner not yet touched by sunlight and crosses the garden. A glimpse of himself in the glinting windowpane makes him pause for a moment. He might be tired—eyes ringed in purple, shoulders tilted—but there is a brightness in his own smile that Sirius does not recognise in the spectre of his reflection. The tilting corners of his mouth belie a lightness (surely that spell has worn off by now?) that Sirius tries to cling to even as he slips along the side of the house towards the doors to the scullery.

His parents don't think about anyone using the back door or scaling the walled garden because it’s something _so_ Muggle that Sirius thinks his mother would faint to see it. It works to Sirius’ advantage, though, to allow him the freedom at nighttime to walk to the Thames and feed the ducks or go to the marina of the boat club to watch the lights on the water. Never has he found something interesting in his wanderings before, only empty, numb things. But last night, at _Destination_, Sirius found something. He doesn't know what yet. But it's certainly something.

“Quick,” Regulus hisses as soon as Sirius crosses the threshold, waiting in the tiny alcove by the back door. “Before Kreacher comes back. I sent him away when I saw you climb the wall.” Regulus holds onto Sirius’ arm as they both slip up the servants staircase and emerge at the small door near the library. “You’re bloody late, Sirius, it’s well past sunrise.” Regulus finally releases his arm and Sirius grins, throwing his own arm around his brother’s shoulders.

“Went to the owl office,” Sirius replies. “Thank you for throwing Kreacher off for me.”

Regulus shrugs. “Just asked him nicely is all. Didn’t think Mother would like to see you coming back in at this time.” Regulus hovers at the doorway to Sirius’ room, as if there is a Barrier Charm there but Sirius is sure the last one he’d cast in a fit of brotherly rage after their last argument has worn off. “Where were you?”

Sirius isn’t in the habit of lying to Regulus. They are together often in the face of their Mother’s alcoholism or their Father’s overbearing expectations, study and do their homework together. But Regulus always tries a little harder to please their parents. He doesn’t disagree as vehemently as Sirius, who is incapable of keeping his mouth shut in the face of things he does not like. Sirius cannot keep quiet like Regulus does when Orion smiles over the _Prophet’s _report of Muggle deaths. Regulus averts his eyes and disagrees, yes, but in a silent way that cannot get him hurt. Perhaps that means he’s smarter than Sirius but Sirius cannot keep things bubbling like that, else he’d burst with them. He hopes Regulus disagrees, anyway.

“Just walking,” Sirius says, flopping down onto his bed. “I’m going to sleep for a while, before Father comes to find me.”

Regulus watches him for a moment, his gaze far too cool and piercing for a 16-year old. “Okay. See you at lunch, then.”

“Yeah, see you then.”

Regulus shuts the door on his way out, and Sirius crawls up his bed to lie there properly and bury his face into his pillows. He just needs to sleep for a moment.

“Master Black.” Kreacher’s voice pierces through Sirius’ shallow sleep. For a moment he thinks of… _waking_ on that park bench, the remnants of that nightclub swirling around him. Had it been a dream?

“Kreacher?” Sirius mumbles, sitting up and rubbing sleep from his eyes.

“Master requests your presence in his office, young master,” Kreacher says, his voice low but resonant in the strange way house-elves are.

Sirius nods and swings his legs from the bed. “Yes, I’ll be down in a moment.”

Kreacher disappears from the room with a pop and Sirius heaves a breath, standing to change his clothes quickly. He doesn’t imagine his father will appreciate sleep-rumpled clothes from last night, as much as Sirius would quite like to sit at his father’s desk in an outfit he’d danced with half-bloods in. Presuming, of course, that _Destination_ wasn’t a dream.

When Sirius pulls off his jacket, something tumbles from the pocket onto the thick carpet. Sirius snatches it up, intrigued. It’s not as quite as big as a Galleon, nor small as a Sickle, but a strange mix between gold and silver. It’s iridescent, Sirius realises, sliding along the colour spectrum like those tiny drinks he and Marlene had or the strobe lights on the dance-floor over that boy’s hair.

The boy. Sirius hasn’t thought on him all morning because he doesn’t know how to think of him. What is he meant to think? Sirius has never danced with anyone like that, nor looked into eyes like that before.

The coin shimmers in Sirius’ palm as he picks it up and turns it over. The word _Destination_ glints around its perimeter and it buzzes with a faint hum of magic, warm and throbbing like the beat of the music. At the centre of the coin there sits a section of a map. It’s London, Sirius realises, recognising the street names, with one corner pinpointed with a particular flare of shimmering light. It’s not where the club was last night though, Sirius is sure. It’s across the Thames, nowhere near Islington. Perhaps it… moves, every night? How strange. Sirius’ heart flitters in anticipation. He has today to get through, lessons with Orion, just to get through today then he and James can go searching.

Sirius stashes the coin in the spell-hidden compartment in his dresser, where he keeps his favourite letters from James and the book on Hogwarts Mrs. McGonagall had given him years ago, before he runs downstairs to meet his father in the study.

Orion Black is a formidable man with a stern widow’s peak and hair still as black as pitch despite his progressing age. Sirius dislikes his parents but he’s vaguely glad for their genetics, he supposes. If only they could not think Purebloods are inherently better than half-bloods, mudbloods or Muggles. Sirius isn’t sure how they can think that when there are more half-bloods than Purebloods now and the Sacred 28 seem so much less… _advanced_ than the other wizards. Purebloods don’t have clubs like _Destination_, do they? And Sirius thinks some Muggles look pretty fascinating, actually, with their cars and motorbikes and things called airplanes that Sirius still doesn’t understand fully.

All morning Sirius watches the window to see the arrival of the Potter owl Cesare just in case James can’t make their plans tonight, but the owl doesn’t appear and Sirius only brims with excitement. Three times he gets so distracted by the idea of what might happen tonight, bolstered by James at his side, thinking of finding that boy again, that Orion raps him across the knuckles with his wand. Orion has taken to punishing Sirius _the Muggle way_ recently, since he’d found a book on Muggles beneath Sirius’ pillow where he’d been reading and forgotten to stash it away before Kreacher had seized it.

Sirius accepts each rap without dropping his quill and does his best to bite the inside of his cheek just to hurry the day along. He eats lunch with Regulus in their shared study room and Regulus tells him of his Potions lesson with Mr. Slughorn and his Runes and Rituals lesson with Mr. Avery. In the afternoon he’s back with Orion in the study again, being walked through the ledgers for the family business despite Sirius not _quite_ understanding what his father does yet. Perhaps ignorance is his best weapon, and if he plays the fool it can put off his ascension to the head of the Black family for as long as possible. He’s 18 now, ready to take over any day now according to Orion, ready to marry some Pureblood girl with wide hips according to Walburga.

Sirius wants neither of those things.

Thankfully, Orion dismisses him for the day shortly before dinner and Sirius has enough time to go upstairs and shower. He dresses for dinner in dress robes, as per Walburga’s stipulation, and sits through three courses with his knee bouncing beneath the jacquard tablecloth. Sirius smiles and nods in all the appropriate places and clenches his back teeth together when Orion discusses the uprising in half-blood jobs. Apparently the Ministry is looking to put in place regulations where all magical companies will be required to employ at least a nominal amount of half-bloods and mudbloods. Sirius thinks that a good idea because all of the people he met last night were fascinating. They were just like normal wizards, so why shouldn’t they be employed and receive everything he would as a Pureblood?

After dinner, where Regulus gives him copious puzzled looks as he keeps uncharacteristically quiet, Sirius retreats to his bedroom. He reads for a while, with nervous, flittering fingers, until it’s late enough. Until he can hear Walburga talking to Aunt Druella in the drawing room, their voices raised and gin-soaked, loud enough to drown out anything.

Sirius changes from his dress robes to the clothes Uncle Alphard had bought him last summer. He doesn’t wear robes when he goes out walking, they draw too many looks. Instead he wears black jeans and a buttoned shirt, usually stashed at the back of his wardrobe away from prying eyes. Alphard had insisted, of course, that when Sirius stayed with him for a week last summer, he would wear something other than those _ghastly, outdated_ robes. Sirius agreed, of course, but had to hide them away.

He shrugs on his leather jacket, also from Alphard, and before he leaves his room, almost forgotten, retrieves the coin from his drawer and shoves it in his pocket. Down the servant’s staircase—another place Walburga would not think to look for him in—and out of the back door. The back door this time, not the front, not when he can think straight without the Cruciatus curse.

Sirius meets James outside King’s Cross at 10pm, just as he had asked. James suits the light blue denim jeans he’s worn, and the deep burgundy collared shirt too. He greets Sirius with a handshake and pushes his glasses back onto his nose by wrinkling it up with a smile.

“What’s this place, then?” James says by way of greeting as they move out of the way of the late-evening crowds that seem perpetual around train stations.

“A nightclub. I… stumbled on it last night, started talking to this group outside, half-bloods they must be…” Sirius says as they walk down the street.

James rolls his eyes and shoves at Sirius’ shoulder. “Not half-bloods. Just wizards, Sirius. They’re just wizards.”

“I know.” Sirius tuts and shoves his hands in his pockets, trying not to look like a petulant teenager. “I’m trying not to say it. S’hard when that’s what you’ve called them since you were old enough to talk.”

“I know…” James softens as they turn a few corners.

“Anyway,” Sirius huffs, turning down another street and sliding a glance sideways to check James is following. He is. “This place. It was _full_ of people, I mean _full_, James. Couldn’t move for the people, all dancing together—and not the waltz either—and they were so friendly?” Sirius wonders if Marlene and Lily will be there again, Caradoc and Benjy and maybe Fabian with his denim jacket. Or the boy. Sirius can remember nearly nothing of him besides a scar-nicked smile and amber-yellow eyes. Not what he was wearing, or any other defining features. But he’s sure he’ll recognise him again.

James smiles indulgently as they walk, his hands in his jean pockets. “Yeah?”

“And the music. It was so loud, you could _feel _it. Never heard anything like it, James. And there were these little drinks that you drank in one go that changed colours, and fizzing drinks. Way stronger than elf-wine. And—” Sirius glanced around and stepped closer to James as they walked in tandem— “these little sweets one of the girls had. Had to be Levitation Charms, or something_, _but they make you… I dunno… worry less? Everything was amazing.”

“Sirius,” James says, looking over the rim of his glasses at Sirius. He looks almost _grave_ and not at all in-keeping with the excitement bubbling within Sirius’ gut. “How long have we known each other?”

Sirius can answer without doing mental arithmetic. “Near seven years.”

“I have never, in seven years, heard you say that many words in one go before.” James’ face spreads into a grin as he claps Sirius on the shoulder. “This place must be bloody good.”

“Yeah,” Sirius says emphatically. “You’ll see, we’re nearly there.”

“I thought you said it was on Charterhouse Street?”

“I did. I thought I was, I mean. Then I found this—” Sirius pulls the coin from his pocket after a long, cautious look around— “in my pocket earlier. See there’s a map?” He tilts the coin to let James peer closer without letting his friend take it. He wants to keep a hold of it like a precious heirloom. “I think it must change, every night.”

James pushes his glasses back onto his nose with the back of his hand, studying the map then their corresponding surroundings. They’re only a street away. “Why?”

“Why does it change? No clue. Guess we’ll find out.” Sirius keeps the coin in his hand as they turn the corner onto the street, as if it might be his admittance ticket or something, he hasn’t thought that far ahead. The point on the map indicates this corner…

“It’s not here,” Sirius blurts, frowning as he turns on one foot to take in the surroundings. “Neon doorway… should be here…”

“Leme see?” James says, holding his hand out, also peering around.

Sirius reluctantly holds out the coin, but as he does the etchings on the side of it glint in the lamplight. “Wait!” He snatches it back. “Hold on! _Left, left, straight, right, straight—_” Sirius is hit with a dull remembrance of the night before, wandering aimlessly through Clerkenwell, left, left, straight, right, straight. He grasps James’ arm and tucks them together, marching down the street with renewed purpose.

The directions bring them out onto a small lane, inhabited by the back entrance of a few takeaways and the stairwells for the flats above. The full moon hanging in the sky throws shards of silvery light down onto the street, illuminating dull corners and dingy entryways. But there’s nothing that looks like _Destination_ here, nothing to confirm Sirius hadn’t been dreaming last night. He’s about to throw the coin away in frustration when it throbs and pulses in his hand, iridescent.

James makes a sort of spluttered, surprised noise and Sirius sees the doorway slide into existence in front of them, between a dingy, newspaper-plastered window and a large bin. “Merlin.”

Sirius grins and keeps a hold of James’ arm. “Let’s go.” He marches right up to the door and pushes it open, stepping into the same small hallway from the night before. The same grizzled man with the eyepatch is waiting beyond and he looks at Sirius as if he remembers him even though there must be hundreds of people who come through this door.

When James shuts the outside door behind them Sirius gets the same Portkey-sucking sensation behind his navel and James tightens his hand on Sirius’ arm like he’s feeling the same thing. The man lets them past with an odd, curious look, but Sirius thinks that might just be how he looks at everyone. They go past the cloakroom and out into the same main hall as the night before, passing through the same ear-popping sensation into the music, bright and thumping through their feet.

“Merlin,” James breathes again from next to Sirius as the music throbs through them.

“See?” Sirius says in James’ ear. “It’s amazing!”

James is already moving to the music, grinning ear to ear. “Yeah!”

“Come on!” Sirius calls over the music, stepping out of the way for more people arriving behind them. He takes James’ arm and leads him towards the bar. “Let’s get a drink!”

Sirius has to battle through to the bar this time, not realising how much Marlene had cleared a route for them the night before in her high heels and the bull’s ring through her nose. Sirius and James press through the crowds that seem far more overwhelming without Marlene sturdy by Sirius’ side and when they get to the counter Sirius gasps a breath. He has to wait for a moment to catch the bartender—Marlene had caught his eye instantly—and when he leans over and describes those colour-changing little drinks he gets nothing but a strange look. Persistent if anything, Sirius leans up onto his elbow to speak clearer into the bartender’s ear and then the man rolls his eyes and walks off.

The bartender comes back with six of those little glasses and Sirius passes him three Galleons in exchange, like Marlene had done the night before. Sirius, incredibly pleased with his purchase, nudges three drinks over to James. The drinks slide through the colour spectrum again, jumping along in odd, dissonant contrast with the strobe lights around them—red, blue, green, silver, purple, blue again, red, blue.

“Here,” he says into James’ ear over the music, “you drink them all in one.” Sirius holds up one glass and waits for James to do the same before he clinks the sides together and pours the liquid into his mouth.

James splutters and coughs, his eyebrows raising, but, ever valiant, he picks up his second and third glasses in time with Sirius and knocks them back. The drinks burn down Sirius’ throat and settle heavy in his stomach but he’s excited by it, coaxed through the uncomfortable taste by what he knows the other side of it will hold. Sirius has to admit he’s a little woozy by the time the third glass hits the counter, though. He’d not eaten so much that day, too sick with nerves and excitement, but now he was jittering almost.

Sirius peers around the crowd, thrilling with the way the lights shift and move and everything blurs so pleasantly. He wonders if he will see the boy again tonight, if he might dance with him again and feel the heat of his touch. He was so intriguing, all scarred and yellow-amber, his eyes unfocused and glassy in a way Sirius wanted to know intimately.

Sirius peels through the crowd with James at his elbow, looking around. The room is smaller than last time, and a different shape, he’s sure. There’s a wide archway in one corner and when Sirius steps over the threshold his ears pop like he’s gone too high on his broom and there’s a different kind of music here. The lights stay red and throw deep shadows into the corners of the rooms. There are less people in this room, moving slower and closer to music that is still thrumming but sounds as if it’s been slowed down on a turntable.

James pushes his glasses further onto his nose and looks around, standing with his shoulder pressed against Sirius’ to stop them from getting jostled apart.

“Come on,” Sirius said into James’ ear, tugging on his arm.

“Are you looking for someone?” James calls back over the music as Sirius leads them down a corridor lit with sconces and plastered with posters. It’s a jarring contrast but it doesn’t seem out of place here. _Destination_ feels like a mix of everything possible, like everything in the world could converge together here. The music is quieter in the corridor and Sirius pushes open a swinging door into another room, more people dancing, more thrumming, pressing music.

It seems a dead end though, so Sirius presses James—who is looking around, wide-eyed—back down the corridor. Another door is there that Sirius didn’t notice before, and James pushes it open, intrigue clear on his face as he steps through the door and Sirius peers over his shoulder, captivated.

The room is near-black, with strange neon lights daubed across walls and bodies. It’s a small room with a small group of people in and Sirius feels at once like he’s intruding. He swallows and steps away and James steps back into him, shooting him a grin.

“This place is wild,” James says in the quiet of the corridor as the door behind them swings shut.

“Right?” Sirius shucks a hand through his hair. It’s up, he realises, and quickly pulls the band from his hair to let it fall against his neck and graze his collarbones. “C’mon…”

James follows Sirius out the corridor and through another door that might’ve appeared from nowhere. Sirius pops onto his toes to peer over the crowds. At this point, he’s not sure who he’s looking for. He looks for mousy-brown hair and yellow-amber eyes, limbs and looseness and glassy expressions. He looks for short, blonde hair and a nose ring, high heels and purple smiles. He looks for a whirl of red hair, or a wave of dark hair and dark eyes. Maybe they aren’t here every night. But why wouldn’t they be? Sirius thinks this is the best place he’s ever been, he never wants to _leave_.

“Are you looking for someone?” James says, putting his arm around Sirius’ waist to lean up and speak in his ear. They’re the same height, but Sirius is on his toes, wearing thick boots, looking through the crowd.

“Yeah,” Sirius says back, dropping back onto his heels and sighing a little.

“You meet someone last night?” James’ grin curls upwards as Sirius brushes past him and starts through another large archway and the throngs of people beyond.

_Did I? _Sirius thinks, biting his lip. Did that boy count as _someone?_ They had danced for a moment and the boy had held his hand with warm fingers and smiled muzzily at him. Did that count? But Sirius’ heart thrums pleasantly at the memory and the thought of pressing against that boy again and letting the music undulate through them like a second heartbeat fills him with warmth and excitement. Once again Sirius scans the people closest to him for those amber-yellow eyes.

A face he recognises appears from the sea of the crowd, like a wave separating on the shore and lapping further than the others. Marlene’s bright hair and her tall stature make her easy to spot, and at her shoulder is Lily’s fiery wreath of hair, tumbling down from a braid around her head.

Marlene spots Sirius through the crowd and her face splits into a grin. She plows through the people around her and seizes Sirius into a hug. “Sirius! You ran off last night, where’d you go? Find someone you like?”

Sirius is a little taken aback—he’s never had someone apart from James so enthusiastic to see him—but he hugs Marlene all the same and smiles at her. “This is James!” he says into Marlene’s ear, gesturing to the boy beside him, who appears to be staring at Lily, open-mouthed.

“Hi James,” Marlene says, clapping him on the shoulder. “C’mon, everyone else is over here.”


	3. Chapter 3

Marlene and Lily lead Sirius and James to a booth along one wall. When they pass into the vicinity of the table Sirius’ ears pop with that mystery charm, meant to dim the the music just enough for chatter to be heard. Sirius mentally rifles through the spells he knows, wanting immediately to understand the inherent magic of this place. It’s not quite a Silencing Charm, is it? It’s like a privacy charm, dulling everything enough for conversation to be heard, but not blocking it out completely. Before Sirius steps up to the table, he can’t hear the group at all, but he can now, and the music is dialled down. It’s still louder than anything Sirius has heard since before last night and rings through his whole body like the resonance of a bell, but it’s electrifying.

Lily slides in next to Benjy and flicks her wand to set a tray of floating drinks down on the table. There’s a couple in the corner of the booth with their arms around each other, and Sirius recognises the redheaded boy from the night before, the one with the Hogwarts jacket. Lily floats a drink up in front of Sirius’ face and he snatches it quickly, sipping the fizzing liquid. James stays next to him, staring at the group as if they are a herd of particularly placid Erumpents. Lily looks like she’s hiding a half-smile, like Regulus used to do when Sirius would prank their Charms tutor.

Marlene introduces them to the group with a flick of her fingers. “That’s Alice and Frank, there’s Fabian—you met him yesterday Sirius—and his twin brother Gideon.”

Sirius smiles and waves politely at them all, pushing his hand into his pocket once he’s done. He’s nervous, he realises, swallowing great gulps of the drink to hope it calms his nerves. It fizzes gently on his tongue and makes him feel lightheaded. It’s nothing like Lily’s sweets of the night before but it’s calming enough when he sets the glass back on the table.

When Sirius moves forward, Marlene grasps him by the wrist and pulls him into the seat next to her. Marlene smiles when Sirius shifts a little to turn towards the crowd to keep an eye out for yellow-amber eyes.

“Looking for someone?” Marlene says in his ear, her arm sliding over his shoulders. Sirius hasn’t been this close to a woman without proper introductions or proper dancing holds or forced time in the corner of a parlour room to _court_. Sirius prefers this, Marlene feels like a friend, and that’s so novel.

“Mm, I think so?” Sirius finds the atmosphere around him loosens his tongue, and things he wouldn’t admit before just seem easier to talk about. He smiles to himself at the memory of yellow-amber eyes and scar-knicked smiles.

“Oh, so that _is _where you went last night?” Marlene sips her own drink but keeps her arm over his shoulders. “Get lucky?”

Sirius splutters over his next breath and tries not to flush scarlet at the way Marlene grins in the corner of his eye. “No,” he grits out, feeling his cheeks heating. “No. I don’t—”

Marlene smiles and taps the rim of her drink against her bottom lip and the glass stains deeper and deeper red from her makeup. She waits for Sirius to talk, and when he doesn’t immediately offer something to say, she holds her glass out for him. Sirius takes the drink, the contents fizzing a little more vigorously than his own earlier, and gulps a mouthful of it.

“This place ever… kick anyone out?” Sirius blurts as he holds the drink back out to Marlene.

Marlene straightens her nose ring—Sirius hadn’t realised it was crooked until she adjusted it—and hums thoughtfully. “Well, Moody’s kicked some people out before, I mean, if you’re doing something you shouldn’t b—”

“No, no,” Sirius says, waving a hand impatiently. The Black signet ring glistens on his finger but everything is too blurry and the lights flash (red, blue, green, silver, purple, blue again, red, blue) quick enough that the crest isn’t obvious. “I mean _the building_, the club.”

“Not… not that I know of?” Marlene looks vaguely puzzled and sips her drink.

“Like, Apparated you out, or a Portkey or something… in the middle of everything?” Sirius plucks at his own bottom lip, holding Marlene’s gaze for a moment before it gets too intense and his eyes flicker across the rest of the group. James has his arms folded on the table and he’s attempting to engage Lily in conversation.

“Nah. Never heard of anything like that…” Marlene drains her glass and sets it down on the table. Sirius watches the dregs of liquid fizz and bubble for a moment. “Is _that_ where you went to last night? What did you do?”

Sirius shrugs. He doesn’t know what to say to that, doesn’t know whether to divulge his dance with the boy to anyone. He wants to keep it secret, almost, just between them. Never mind the fact nothing _actually_ happened, and there’s a kernel of fear that Marlene will tease him for being so caught up in one little dance with a stranger. “Care to dance?”

Marlene watches him. Her lip curls up at the corner like the idea of a smile and she inclines her head. “Sure.”

Sirius slides out of his seat first and Marlene follows. She takes his hand as she straightens next to him—an inch or two taller in her high heels—and leads them onto the dance floor. Sirius peers through the crowd looking for the boy or any vague ideation of him, desperate to confirm last night hadn’t been some strange fever dream.

Marlene finds them a small gap in the crowd and starts dancing, her head tilted back slightly, a blissful smile on her face. Sirius’ gaze flickers around the crowd for some kind of cue as to how to act, or how to _dance_ like this, but after a moment his body seems to realise what to do and fall into this strange rhythm. Marlene has her hand on his shoulder and they’re dancing _together_ but not as close as some other girls and boys in the club… not like Sirius and the boy were last night.

Sirius dances, keeping an eye out for the boy through the crowd, feeling as if those amber-yellow eyes might land on him at any moment, peering through the crowds atop a scar-nicked mouth that smiles muzzily at Sirius and makes him want to kiss the alcohol from his lips. That’s what he wants, isn’t it? To kiss the boy, to know what that mouth tastes like and feel those eyes on him. Sirius bites his lip and pops onto his toes to peer over the crowd, lingering in doorways and dark corners just in case.

Through the throngs of people Sirius spots not amber-yellow eyes but James’ wild hair next to Lily’s deep red braids, coming towards him and Marlene. Caradoc is next to them, levitating a tray of drinks above their heads and he grins at Marlene and Sirius when he appears next to them.

“Drinks!” Benjy calls next to him as Caradoc lowers the tray and Marlene snatches a drink from the tray and tips it into her mouth. Sirius follows suit, eager to keep up and learn all of this newness. James is smiling idiotically, his eyes glued on Lily, who sweeps up a drink each for them.

Gideon throws an arm around Sirius’ shoulders as they dance again and Sirius finds he’s grinning—whether it’s from the fizzing drinks or the fizzing sensation of having _friends_, he’s not sure—as they move to the music. He keeps looking for the boy through the crowd, all loose-limbed, lanky but graceful, but he doesn’t see him. Sirius is _sure_ he’d recognise him.

Marlene floats another tray of drinks between the group and Sirius drinks one in quick competition with both Gideon and James. Two other girls Sirius hasn’t been introduced to appear, smiling at the group and greeted with hugs and kisses. No one bothers to introduce them but they smile at Sirius and one even hugs him briefly, her arms strong around his shoulders. She loops an arm around Marlene’s waist and leaves a bright red smudge of lipstick on the corner of her mouth and Sirius tries not to stare. Everything is so new and interesting and Sirius has _never_ seen people like this. Perhaps James has, he’s hung around with half-bloods before and seems far less shocked, but Sirius finds every atom of this place and all the spaces between so intensely fascinating.

The more Sirius drinks, the harder it seems to peer through the crowd to look for that face he hopes his insides will remember, even when his head does not. He stands on his tiptoes with his hand braced on Marlene’s shoulder or Gideon’s forearm and dances with these half-blood strangers like they are his closest friends, like they have known each other for lifetimes. Sirius thinks on the idea of friendship and thinks these people probably _are_ his closest friends. He doesn’t feel like he’s friends with any of the other Pureblood sons and daughters his parents invite to the house, even if he did kiss that Flint girl and fumble around with that Carrow boy. So perhaps these people are his friends. The idea of it would make his mother’s blood boil so Sirius grins and grips tighter to Gideon’s arm when he is peering around for the boy (he doesn’t see him) and puts his arm around the girl with her red lipstick smudged at Marlene’s mouth when they dance.

He drinks and dances, dances and drinks. He smiles at James and gets a muzzy grin in return that says _you were right, Black, you were fucking right, this place is brilliant._ The lights around them flash in a rhythm of near-familiarity—red, blue, green, silver, purple, blue again, red, blue—over Sirius’ pale skin, the light of James’ glasses, Marlene’s nose ring, Lily’s painted fingernails. Lily retrieves another handful of sweets from her pocket, taps her wand and swallows one. Sirius notices through his muzzy, alcohol-haze and sandwiches himself between Lily and Caradoc because he wants to feel that lightness again, wants a glimpse of what it is like to feel carefree and for the weight to rise from his shoulders like a feather under the watchful gaze of his old Charms tutor.

Lily whispers her spell to each of the sweets in turn, lets Marlene grab one, then Benjy, Fabian, the red lipstick girl Sirius still doesn’t know the name of. James gives Sirius a curious look until his friend takes his own sweet and eagerly swallows it down, only then does he take one from Lily’s palm and give her a look of pure, unadulterated adoration. She smiles muzzily back at him and catches his elbow when he floats back onto his heels.

Sirius dances, light on his feet, on his toes, strung up by puppet strings into an alternative universe where he has friends and people who care for him. He peers around for the boy again, tall through the crowds with his head of curls—it was copper and brown, Sirius remembers, in that flash of fluorescent light. He’s sure he would remember the way the boy moves, lithe and loose-limbed, prowling. At some point, after another one of Lily’s floating sweets, feeling like he is drifting towards skyscrapers, moored only by the coin in his pocket, silk-thread and tenuous, linking he and all of these people around him, dancing, whirling, leaving the after-burn of friendship in Sirius’ eyelids, he finds himself in search of the bathroom or the bar or somewhere that isn’t full of bodies that _aren’t_ the boy.

An hour or so earlier Marlene had tapped him on the arm with a charm of some kind that let a little firefly lead he and James to the bathroom and back to their group—Marlene said the layout of _Destination_ changes every night, and sometimes it’s easy to get turned around no matter how well you know it—but now Sirius is without it and in search of a moment to breathe. He ends up on a small bench on the outskirts of another room, clutching an empty glass. Slower music is playing here—it still reverberates through Sirius’ shoes and up through his leg bones and nestles into the hollow of his ribcage—and the lights are dim and flickering like candlelight.

It seems a little stupid, a little misplaced, to sit here and watch these couples dancing—covertly, through his eyelashes, he’s _trying_ not to stare—and think about the boy from last night. He watches them dance, wrists crossed behind each other’s heads, moving like they are one being and they flow to and from each other. Some of them are kissing, in the dark corners, smiling and gripping each other and it’s a strange thing to see affection given so freely. Sirius thinks he can count on one hand the amount of times he’s seen affection between his parents.

He imagines dancing closer with the boy, closer than they had the night before, imagines running light fingertips over the boy’s shoulder or down the length of one arm, imagines what the feel of his torso would be like against his own chest—quivering with excitement. He imagines what the boy’s kisses will taste like, whether he will _want_ to kiss Sirius, despite him being woefully inexperienced. He wants the boy to want to kiss him, he wants to kiss him and press against him and dance how that couple there are dancing, undulating against each other.

Sirius becomes aware of his body’s overenthusiastic response to his imagination at the exact moment James Potter sits next to him on one side—Lily is next to him, still smiling muzzily but her eyes are sharp—and Marlene sits on his other side. Sirius slings his arm across his lap, still holding the empty glass, in attempt to cover the bulge in his jeans.

James, thankfully, does not notice. “There you are!” he calls over the music. He’s grinning inanely and his glasses look smudged, dashed with candlelight.

“Still looking for your certain someone?” Marlene says in his ear, plucking the empty glass from his hand and replacing it with a full one. Sirius is too floating to wonder where she gets it from—does she have a tray charmed to float around after her? Has she just been holding it but Sirius’ vision is too blurry and colourful to notice?—and just takes a sip instead.

“Yeah,” he replies, looking out over the crowd. He’s not sure whether this group of people would mind him dancing with a boy—he doesn’t want the _sickness_ drawn out of him with another Cruciatus Curse, not in front of these nice people—and maybe Marlene and the girl with the red lipstick dance like that too, but he stays quiet. He doesn’t know what else to say.

“What do they look like? Maybe we know them, or we’ve seen them around?” Lily leans across James and plants her hand on Sirius’ knee. Apparently Marlene has appraised her of the situation, and maybe James as well, or else she’s just very good at inferring a conversation.

Sirius doesn’t know if he can describe the boy—_Salazar_, he really needs to think of a name to call him, something that isn’t vaguely offensive and goes some way to describe how Sirius feels under his yellow-amber gaze—from what he remembers. He only remembers the pull on his insides and his urge to press closer, closer.

“I’m… not sure?” Sirius says around the rim of the glass Marlene had pressed into his hand. He gulps back two mouthfuls of it because he feels better with the drink fizzing through his system, like he cares distinctly less what he says and what others think of him and it’s _such_ a freeing experience that he wants to dig his teeth into it and not let it go. “We just danced…”

Marlene shrugs, her shoulder jostling into Sirius’. “So? See them again and dance some more.”

Sirius plucks his lower lip between his thumb and forefinger, swallows another mouthful of his drink and lets his gaze flicker across the group again. He secretly hopes he doesn’t see the boy here—not in this room of dancing close and candlelight and undulating bodies—so he looks back to see Marlene, James and Lily watching him closely. He told James about that fumble with the Carrow boy so James isn’t surprised, he doesn’t think. But _Sirius _is surprised, Sirius is bowled-over by the way the memory of this boy has stuck fast to the inside of his eyelids and burrowed a home into the space between his ribs so he feels it whenever he breathes in too sharply.

“It’s… I don’t remember him so much. Tall, brown-ish hair… eyes—” Sirius trails off, he doesn’t know how to describe his eyes. He wants to say _skin like moonlight_ but Salazar, does that sound stupid. “Amber eyes,” he murmurs quietly after a moment, “freckles on his nose.”

Marlene frowns and looks across at Lily. They exchange some kind of look together, something that only girls do or only half-bloods do, Sirius isn’t sure.

“Oh. I might know him,” Marlene says with surety after a moment. Sirius wonders for a moment whether Marlene knows everyone in this club, regardless of how it seems to shift and spin even whilst they are in it. He wouldn’t put it past Marlene; she seems like an inescapable font of knowledge. She taps Lily on the arm with her painted fingernails. “He always used to get Levies from you a few months ago. The one with the—” Marlene gestures to her mouth where the boy’s own scar sits— “you know. Looks a bit like he needs a fortune spent on him in the chippy.”

“Oh yeah! I remember him, with the Levies.” Lily seems pleased with herself, watching the crowd for a moment.

Sirius looks to James, to see if he knows what they are talking about, but his friend looks blissfully unaware of the conversation, watching Lily’s profile in the flickering lights instead. James looks drunk, looks floating and wondrous. Sirius thinks idly that he might look like that too; they’ve had the same drinks, the same little sweets from Lily’s palm. He doesn’t think on it too much though, his brain keeps floating back to the boy.

“Anyway,” Marlene says, as if she’s remembering they’re mid-conversation. “He disappears for a while every so often, this guy. I don’t know his name though.” She turns to look at Sirius; her eyes are frightening blue and piercing. “He’ll be around though. If I see him, I’ll tell him.” Marlene smiles wickedly, the ring in her nose twisting.

Sirius gapes and feels his untethered, floating heart lodge in his throat. “I mean—don’t—” _what if he doesn’t remember? What if he wanted a dance and nothing more? _Sirius doesn’t want to put him off or embarrass himself. He has _no_ idea how any of this works.

Marlene laughs and claps him on the shoulder. “Nah. I won’t say a word, if you don’t want me to, kid.” She ruffles Sirius’ hair—he’s still unused to it being loose around his shoulders and her fingers feel lovely—and grins at him. “You’re a good kid, I gotcha.”

Sirius sits with Marlene on one side and James on the other, watching the crowds. After a while, James stifles a yawn into his shoulder and Lily laughs at him, patting him on the head.

“Sweet little darling,” she says in a lull in the music. “Way past your Pureblood bedtime, hm?”

James flushes crimson and his grin goes a little goofy. Sirius descends into laughter and lets his head drop onto James’ shoulder. It’s true, though, isn’t it? Neither James nor Sirius have ever done anything like this before. Sirius has been out all night but he sits in solitude at the Marina, not dances with half-bloods and eats charmed sweets.

“Yeah,” mutters James, rubbing a hand over his mouth. “I’m going home. Mum’ll kill me if she catches me sneaking back in at this hour.”

“You still live at home?” Marlene says, raising an eyebrow.

Sirius is getting used to reading their lips over the noise of the music. He frowns into his now-empty glass. Where else would they live? That’s how it works: live at home until you marry, move in together and start producing heirs as soon as practically possible.

Apparently, the look on James and Sirius’ faces answer for them and Lily and Marlene share a giggle of laughter before Marlene nudges at Sirius’ shoulder. “Go on then, off back home.”

Sirius is a little bewildered as Marlene and Lily usher him and James through the corridors and rooms of Destination to end up at the front door, with Moody staring at them expectantly. When he opens the door Sirius gets the same sucking sensation behind his navel and he can already see they’re somewhere completely different when he and James step through.

“That was great,” James says, throwing his arm around Sirius’ shoulders. “That was so good.”

“Right?” Sirius tests the word on his tongue, unused to floating like this in the night air.

“We have to go again.”

“Agreed.” Sirius is silent for a while. He assumes James is walking them towards the Floo Point at King’s Cross, but he doesn’t pay enough attention to street signs to find out, only pausing when James produces his wand and it spins on his palm to point them in the right direction.

“I’ll owl you,” Sirius says as they stop outside the Floo Point—_Open 24/7! Great off-peak rates!_—and James turns to him.

“Yeah, absolutely.” James’ eyes look a little foggy. It must be Lily’s sweets, Sirius thinks, still not quite understanding what they did except make everything _brilliant._ “G’night, Black.”

“Night Potter.” Sirius claps him on the back and lets James anchor him back into the real world for a moment. He watches the other boy duck through the door to the Floo point and lets the door swing shut behind him before he starts moving off back towards Grimmauld Place.

It’s still dark when he gets to the alley behind the house and Number 12 slides into view on the wings of the charms that have been surrounding it for centuries. Sirius isn’t sure if it’s the fizzing drinks or Lily’s sweets or the freedom of _Destination_, but the old magic of the building feels oppressive and heavy. Sirius feels it in his heart, pulling and weighing him down. He scales the wall with more difficulty this time and since the light is off in Regulus’ window he has to ease the scullery door open and peer around for Kreacher but the house elf is nowhere to be seen.

Sirius steals up the servant’s staircase to the eerie, creaking half-silence of the house. Somehow, he manages not to meet anyone in the corridor, although he’s sure his parents will know he’s been out and he’ll be reprimanded for it. Sirius gets into bed as quickly and quietly as possible, curling under the covers and trying desperately to hold onto the phantom floating-freedom of _Destination_.

It’s then he realises he didn’t find the boy. He closes his eyes to remember the look on his face, the curling of his mouth in a muzzy, blurry half-smile, his amber-yellow eyes, his moonlight skin, he was all moonlight. Endless moonlight and Sirius has always thought the night sky was beautiful but this boy only makes him ache for the nighttime. Sirius imagines dancing closer to him, imagines their togetherness in the tight humidity of the club, imagines _kissing him_. How would he kiss? Would it be the same, bewildering, wild ride as dancing with him? Sirius wants to know, _needs_ to know.

Sirius isn’t sure when he stopped thinking and started dreaming but he and the boy are pressed close now. His lips taste of fizzy drinks and Lily’s candied orange peel sweets. Sirius is floating, floating, floating. If it weren’t for the boy’s arm around his shoulder he would just float right away. But they’re kissing in slow, indolent little passes, kissing and pressing together. Are they in the club? Maybe. Sirius can’t tell. Are they in that black-lit room with the daubs of neon paint? He’s not sure but his eyelids flutter open when the boy pulls back and draws breath. His eyes are so bright and the moonlight is pouring over them, a full moon seeping in from somewhere because Sirius is _sure_ they’re indoors.

But then the boy kisses him again, the wet warmth of his tongue in Sirius’ mouth. His hands are everywhere and Sirius can’t keep up, he’s just floating away on feeling, pliant and malleable in the moonlight. They’re kissing and pressing close, close, close.

Sirius gasps and comes awake with a start. It only takes a second before he realises that distinctly uncomfortable feeling is a stickiness in his underwear. Grimacing, he rolls over—very gingerly—and seizes his wand from the bedside table. He spells away the evidence of his—wonderful—dream and buries his face into his pillow. His lips are tingling with dream-kisses and he wants to savour it like Marlene’s fizzy drinks and Gideon and James dancing with him and Lily’s sweets and the boy’s moonlight smile.

Moony, Sirius thinks, with skin drenched in moonlight and the feel of the silver rays like fresh air, like those little iridescent drinks. _Moony_. That’s what he’ll call him, in the sanctuary of his mind, in the _Destination_ of his daydreams and night-dreams and the place itself until he finds him again.

Tomorrow, he’ll go back tomorrow.


	4. Chapter 4

“I don’t care! I’m not doing it!”

“You have no choice in the matter! Just as I didn’t, as your father didn’t! You’ll do what is expected of you and nothing less! We have a _reputation_ to uphold.”

“You can’t make me do a single Merlin-damned thing!”

Walburga flings a curse that raps off the arm of the chair as Sirius instinctively flinches away from it. He refuses to do what she asks of him, he’d rather be hiding away upstairs, hungry, than sitting at a dinner party with his extended family, dress robes, straight back, endless silverware and manners. He’d rather be daydreaming of _Destination_ but he can’t, he’s sat across from Walburga, her screaming echoing off the walnut panelled walls. Being brought back down into Grimmauld Place from the halls of his imagination—with a painful crash—is a surefire way to put Sirius in a bad mood and he can’t help snapping at his mother.

“Oh I can.” Walburga lowers her voice and strides closer. Sirius is struck through with fear and it might be the only thing capable of making him bite his tongue. “Don’t make me, Sirius, you know I can.”

“You wouldn’t,” Sirius breathes, eyeing the tip of Walburga’s wand as it hovers menacingly in front of his face. He’s looking for the half-light of an Unforgivable, for the _Cruciatus_ or _Imperius_ his mother favours when he will not do as he’s told. He wants as much warning as possible if the pain is to come, or if he’ll be forced to watch his own body with some sick lack of control, prostrating itself and pleading for forgiveness.

“Wouldn’t I?”

“Don’t make me. Anything but that. You can’t do that.” Sirius hates that he’s pleading but he doesn’t want the Imperius Curse again; nothing is more demeaning than that. Not when they’ll have company for dinner tonight and they’ll be able to _tell_, he’s sure.

“You’ll do as you’re told then,” Walburga says with an air of finality as she straightens up. “You’ll see Capella tonight and you’ll play _nice_ and then, then, Sirius, you will stay quiet and you will sit straight and you’ll nod and agree _graciously_ when your Uncle Ignatius offers the betrothal and you’ll say just _how honoured_ you’ll be to continue the purity of the Black bloodline.”

Walburga watches Sirius with a cruel light in her eyes and anyone who has two brain cells to rub together would nod and smile and agree and find a way out of it later. But Sirius _can’t_. He can’t sit there and agree to marry his second cousin, the one with the child-bearing hips and hair just like Cousin Cissy’s, and have sex with her just to spit out an heir or two and see his life descend into some horrific parody of love and affection. Not when he’s been at _Destination_ with James and Marlene and Lily and—and _Moony_.

Sirius stands from the ornately carved chair and clenches his fists at his side. The vision of his future seems even bleaker now when he’s been faced with floating-lightness and fizzy drinks and scar-knicked smiles. “No I fucking won’t.”

Walburga makes a frustrated noise and flings another acid-green curse from the tip of her wand in Sirius’ direction. The burning sensation coils over his shoulder beneath his robes but Sirius hides a flinch. “Salazar save me, what did I do to deserve an insolent child like you?” She lifts her eyes to the ceiling like she’s waiting for Merlin himself to answer. She does this, Sirius reminds himself, with a short puff of breath from his nose, pretends she’s the injured party.

“Unforgivables don’t help,” Sirius spits in reply, unable to stop the response spilling from his mouth.

Another curse, another spit of _Crucio_ that Sirius recoils from but he can’t hide and the pain is like molten sugar and iron fillings through his veins and it _hurts_. His limbs give out and his back collides _hard_ with the chair as he falls back into it. He doesn’t cry out—that makes Walburga even angrier—but instead he digs his fingernails into the arms of the chair and bites the inside of his cheek so hard he tastes blood.

“You watch your tongue with me, boy,” Walburga says through the haze of the curse, her words clipped and pointed like shards of glass. Tears stream hot down Sirius’ face against the assault of pain and when it fades Sirius is panting hard for breath.

Still, he can’t help it. His first conscious out-breath is a snicker of laughter—near-hysteria—and he blinks a few times before his eyes focus on Walburga, glaring down at him. “You think it’s bad now. Wait ’til you see what happens when you marry me off to someone who shares 64% of my gene pool.”

As soon as the words are out of his mouth Sirius braces for the flare of _Crucio_-pain, but it doesn’t come. Instead, there comes a strange detachment, a severing of Sirius’ puppet strings, a feeling of heavy, leaden paralysis that would be terrifying if he hadn’t experienced it before. Walburga’s smile is cruel as she beckons Sirius’ body to stand—spine straight, shoulders back—and gives him a piercing once-over.

“See, you _can_ behave.” Her voice is sinuous and terrifying and holds painful promises.

Sirius can’t answer, only able to stand as she’s given permission to.

“Now, Sirius.” She waves her wand and Sirius tries to flinch but he can’t move. A chair slides over the deep-dark hardwood floor to situate underneath her as she sits. “You’ll be good, and you’ll smile nicely at Capella and you’ll do what the family expects of you and marry.”

Sirius makes a choked sort of noise—it’s the only thing he can get out. He doesn’t want that. He can’t. He can’t do that.

Walburga levels her wand at Sirius’ nose and leans closer and her perfume is floral and choking and Sirius feels like the world is closing in around him and he can’t breathe. “I know what you’re thinking.” She seems to soften a moment and almost looks remorseful. Sirius has to remind himself he is here under the Imperius and however regretful she looks, she does not truly regret. “You want _love_ like you read in those stupid tales. But you’re a Black, Sirius. You will not get love. That’s not how it works.”

Is she trying to get his _pity?_ Does she want him to sympathise with her because she didn’t get love either? Sirius’ heart is hammering at the base of his throat. He does not want this. He cannot feel sorry for the woman who uses Unforgivables on him. They are unforgivable for a reason.

“So. I suggest you stop with these childish games, or I swear to Salazar I will make life difficult for you, boy.” Oh, there is the mother Sirius recognises. “You will behave and you’ll marry Capella and you’ll forget these foolish ideals of love. How many times do I have to tell you, love does not exist for us. I swear it, you will spend your life trying to find love and never being able to get your hands on it. So give it up. Now.”

Walburga waits, with her wand levelled between Sirius’ eyes, as if she’s waiting for him to answer and slump and say _Merlin, Mother, I’m sorry. I’ll give up my happiness to promote your blood ideals and marry my cousin… _Something in Sirius jars. His mother has said this before. He remembers the words on her tongue and his dumb nodding along just to get her to stop the pain. Only this time there is no pain, only the leaden-weight of his own body out of his control.

Walburga smiles. “You agree, don’t you Sirius? You’ll stop wasting your time on _love_ and start behaving as your father and I expect.”

Before he can stop, the words tumble from his mouth, his tongue writhing in his mouth and he feels ants crawl and snakes slither under the surface of his skin. “Yes. I’ll stop wasting my time on love and start behaving as you and Father expect, Mother.” Sirius wishes he could screw his face up at the way the words taste like poison on his tongue. He wants to beg his mother not to do this to him, but he can’t make the words come and he hates having to ask her for anything. He wants it all to stop. He wants to get out of here and go to _Destination_ with Marlene’s drinks and Lily’s sweets and _Moony_.

Walburga’s smile broadens as she flicks her wand. “Good. How about you go and wait in your room until everyone gets here?”

Like he’s trapped in someone else’s body, Sirius’ feet started moving. He strides up the stairs, nearly falling flat on his face as his toes don’t quite lift over one stair. He wouldn’t put it past his mother to let him fall to the floor, unable to put his hands out to break his fall. At the door to his bedroom Sirius’ shoulder raps smartly off the doorframe, right where a burning graze of pain had settled from that earlier curse. If he was able to cry out, Sirius would.

The first time Walburga had put him under the Imperius Curse he had stood in his bedroom for sixteen hours, stood at the foot of the bed, wishing he was lying down instead, wishing for comfort of any kind as he was forced to stand. The tears had leaked from his eyes and he’d been unable to even blink, no millimetre of his body not under the curse’s control. When it was finally released to him, Sirius’ body was vibrating with pain, unable to do anything but lie there, unable to cry, barely able to breathe.

The second time Sirius had concentrated and breathed through it, learning to unthread and unspool the magic woven around him. It started in his fingers and he prodded and pressed like poking at a festering wound or tonguing at a sore gum. It hurt and pinched but he pressed and pushed and soon he could squeeze and twist out of the curse and shake it off.

Now, the umpteenth time Walburga has put him under the Imperius, Sirius can take a few deep breaths—in his nose, out his mouth—and feel for the seams with his frozen fingertips and wiggle his stuck-fast toes. It takes another three breaths, sharp and deep to combat the tingling, pinching pain, until Sirius can step out of the clenching of the curse and breathe of his own accord.

Sirius redresses in his Muggle clothes as soon as he’s able to use his curse-numb fingers. His leather jacket still smells like the club, like Marlene’s perfume and the drink Caradoc had pressed into his hand and he’d gulped down greedily. Sirius’ fingers shake as he ensures that coin is still deep within his pocket and his wand is in the waistband of his jeans. He won’t do this, he won’t, he won’t.

There’s only one place he wants tonight.

Sirius escapes from the house by casting a cushioning charm on the patch of grass beneath his window and landing with a rattle despite it. He hurries out of the rear garden and climbs over the wall without hearing his mother screeching or Kreacher grumbling. He goes to the Owl Office near King’s Cross so he doesn’t have to risk the staff in the one on Upper Street recognising him. He sends James a scrawled message asking him to meet him tonight—they are going to _Destination_ again. It’s hours until sundown though, so Sirius takes the Floo Point to the Leaky Cauldron and strolls down Diagon Alley. He makes sure to keep away from Knockturn, because he knows his father has eyes everywhere.

He lingers in Flourish & Blotts in the Muggle section, thumbing through manuals for _cars_ and _motorbikes_ and storybooks, and when he gets glared at for not buying anything he slinks off to Quality Quidditch Supplies to lust after the latest Comet and wishes for the millionth time he had someone to play Quidditch with. He kills time and buys a cone of chips from the takeaway hatch at the Leaky and decides, licking salt from his fingers, to sit on the Muggle side of the pub and the small patch of grass beyond it, watching the Muggles go about their business.

They look just like Wizards. They look like there is nothing different and Sirius finds himself staring as they pass, as if he’s looking for the tell that they are Muggles and not Wizards, as if it’s stamped on them or hangs over their heads like a label. The sun sets as Sirius sits and watches Muggle London pass by and before he realises he has to hurry back into the Leaky to pay the barkeep his Floo fare and emerge in King’s Cross.

James steps from the Floo across the way only moments after Sirius has righted himself and brushed the ash from his thighs. He greets Sirius with a handshake and claps him on the upper arm. Sirius hides the flinch from the residual burning pain of his mother’s curse and smiles regardless.

“Where is it tonight then?” James says, scrubbing a hand through his wild hair and smoothing down his shirt—burgundy this time.

Outside the Floo Point, sequestered at the mouth of an alley, Sirius fishes the coin from his pocket and peers at the tiny map in it’s centre. Sirius doesn’t recognise that area of London and neither does James, judging by the furrow of his brow.

“Oh crups…” James says, peering at the coin. “I don’t recognise that. You know where it is?”

Sirius shakes his head, an unreasonably large swell of disappointment rising in his chest. He can’t go back to Grimmauld Place, he needs _Destination_ tonight.

“Mum taught me this map spell… hold on…” James tilts his head until the light glints off the street name. “Elgin Avenue,” he mutters to himself before producing his wand from his sleeve and balancing it on his palm. “_Point-me, Elgin Avenue_.” The wand spins in a circle, once, twice and stabilises to Sirius’ right. It’s not a map, nowhere near, but it gives them a direction to go.

At the main junction down from King’s Cross Sirius stands between James and the Muggles walking the street whilst James does the spell again. They follow the direction of his wand down a long Expressway where the Muggle cars whip past at speed at this time of night. They walk and walk and walk, to the sound of their shoes on the pavement and the cars whizzing by. They make conversation for a short while, stopping to check the _point-me_ spell on James’ wand, and, when it pointed the same direction four times in a row, Sirius’ wand, to make sure the spell isn’t broken. It isn’t. They keep walking. At another junction it points left and they veer from the road, excitement finally cutting through their tiredness. It’s been two hours, maybe three and _Destination_ will be in full force now, most likely. Sirius’ gut clenches at the idea of missing Moony.

Finally, Sirius recognises the street name from the map. They come onto Elgin Avenue and at the corner of Grittleton Road Sirius tilts the coin in his palm and breathes the directions to them both. _Left, left, straight, right, straight, _then, after a moment, a warm pulse of a heartbeat in Sirius’ palm, the neon-crowned doorway slides into existence. James claps Sirius excitedly on the shoulder and attempts to hide a yawn into his shoulder. They barrel through the door together, Moody greets them with a curt nod, and Sirius barely waits for that sucking sensation behind his navel before he’s through the door. He wants to find Moony.

James keeps at Sirius’ heels as they make their way through the rooms. It’s an entirely different layout to the night before and Sirius keeps getting turned around. The long corridor with the red lights is now an expansive room with black-lights and flickering candlelight in sconces at the wall. Another room branches off of a small corridor and there’s billiard tables and people sipping drinks from wide, fat glasses and Sirius thinks of his father’s Firewhisky decanter and holds back the rise of bile in his throat.

After a moment, perhaps sensing Sirius’ discomfort with that room, mahogany panels and whisky-light, James tugs him back into the corridor. He leads Sirius to a bar, where he has a lively conversation with the female bartender—he’s always able to talk to just about anyone, doesn’t have that culture gap that Sirius does because Mrs. Potter lets him hang around with half-bloods. He comes away with four drinks and they gulp one each in a few mouthfuls, parched from the long walk, and sip leisurely at the second one.

James puffs a breath up into his unruly hair that fogs over his glasses for a moment before he turns to pin Sirius with a look. “You looking for that guy?”

Sirius tilts his head to look back at James—his only friend, the only person he trusts to share anything with—and drinks a mouthful of his drink for courage. “That alright?”

Someone stumbles past the duo and James steps back to let him past, but then he looks back to Sirius. He shrugs a shoulder and sips his drink. “Fine by me. Whatever you like, Sirius. I don’t think… I don’t think this place cares.”

“Yeah…” Sirius looks out onto the crowd. There’s all kinds of people here; people who he can’t tell if they are boys or girls—he thinks they might not know themselves, might not _need_ to know—boys wearing dresses and girls wearing button shirts and girls kissing girls and boys—_Salazar_—kissing boys. Sirius flushes red and hopes none of the boys he sees with boys are Moony.

Sirius buys two more drinks for them both and James steers them into another room. The temperature change hits Sirius first as he looks around foliage covered walls, and then he looks up and realises this _room_ is more like a courtyard, open to the elements above and the waning moon peeking over the rooftop. The air in filled with smoke, all different colours and scents and tastes when Sirius breathes in. They’re not smoking pipes though, Sirius realises, following James through throngs of people—they’re smoking little rolled up cigarettes and some of them are bright colours or have bubbles sprouting from the burning red end.

“Oi! James! Sirius!” A pale hand shoots out of the crowd and drags James into the people ahead of Sirius. He follows with his heart in his throat, ducking around someone gesturing wildly, to see Lily, flame red hair unbound around her shoulders (Sirius checks his own hair is loose), grinning at them both. “Hi, you two! Back again? My little Purebloods get a good night’s sleep?” Lily is bouncing on her toes and she seems to be practically _shimmering_ with energy.

James makes a sort of strangled noise at Lily’s attention and grins at her. “Hello Lily, evening. I… you have a good night so far?”

Lily chuckles and scrubs his hair and ushers them both closer. “Benjy and I are just having a bit more Pep.”

Benjy is at a small table, sprinkling greenish crystals into a small rectangle of paper filled with what Sirius _does _recognise—rather pleased with himself—as tobacco. Benjy shoots them a smile. “Alright, James, Sirius. How are ‘ya?” His fingers are busy whilst he talks and Sirius can barely follow the movements as he rolls the paper up and then lights the end with a snap of his fingers. Sirius watches, unabashed, as Benjy sucks on one end and greenish smoke plumes from the other. He grins and Sirius realises this is something like Lily’s sweets, but maybe not quite because they’re not floating but they’re shimmering with vibrancy and energy.

Lily is chattering away to Benjy and James. Sirius isn’t used to hearing so much noise at once—Grimmauld Place is _all _silence—so he has trouble staying present and not just floating for a moment. Lily passes the cigarette to James, who puts it between his lips and Sirius thinks for a second that Lily’s lips have been on it too and James must be pleased by that. James doesn’t cough—Sirius is surprised, maybe he smokes a pipe with his father at home; is that something Sirius is meant to do with _his_ father?—and holds the cigarette out to Sirius. He takes and puts it between his lips and breathes in and the smoke tastes warm and spicy and as soon as it shivers through him Sirius feels _alive_.

They pass the cigarette around the group, wreathed and crowned and topped with greenish smoke as it coils around them like capes and Sirius can’t stop grinning. He wants to dance all night. He wants to find Moony.

“Listen, listen,” Sirius says to Lily as Benjy stubs out the cigarette and ushers everyone back inside. “You ever—you ever have the place kick you out?” Off Lily’s strange look he waves a hand and elaborates. “Not Moody, but like a Portkey, or Apparation. You’re somewhere else, you know. You blink—” he blinks several times in rapid succession, just in case she doesn’t get it— “and you’re somewhere else. Across town or whatever, whatever. Just… not here.”

Lily’s brow is furrowed—there’s glitter in her eyebrows, Sirius notices—as they go into another room. “No. Never. It closes at dawn and empties everyone out and we’ve stayed ’til dawn plenty of times… I’ve never been kicked. You can Apparate _out_ of here if you’re good at it, because it’s the end location that’s important. You can’t Apparate _in_ here though, because it has no fixed location, and that’s one of the three D—” Lily catches herself and Sirius smiles softly at the glimpse of the girl being studious— “You think someone Portkeyed you?”

“Aren’t unregistered Portkeys illegal?” Sirius plucks his bottom lip between his thumb and forefinger and steps aside to let someone past.

Lily laughed and pats his shoulder. “So’s what you just smoked, darling. And what I’ve got in my pocket.” She waves hello to someone in the doorway and clears her throat before picking up their conversation again. “Someone might have a Portkey… no idea why though.” Lily grabs his arm and leads them in James and Benjy’s footsteps through an archway.

This room is dotted with sunken pits of sofas and cushions, bodies sprawled across them, between wide expanses of dance-floor, swept with low-lying silver lights like shards of moonlight. The music jitters up through the soles of Sirius’ shoes in the same way he is jittering himself, like Muggle _lecktricky. _Lily’s hand on his arm feels like fire.

“Although,” Lily continues, her voice pitching along to the music of the room that Sirius thinks he can _feel_ more than he can hear, “a Portkey seems sort of ridiculous, the enchantment is a lot of effort and restricted Ministry info and I don’t think anyone here has real Ministry acc—”

Sirius stops listening. He’d been looking around idly, moving to the music, but now the whole room floods with silence. He has seen that hair before, that singular, shocking, shattering way of moving.

_Moony_.


	5. Chapter 5

Sirius slips through the crowd towards that curly hair, one arm raised above it as Moony dances to the music. His heart is in his throat as he weaves past people, transfixed by the way Moony moves. The light in this room twists and swings with the thudding of the music and it only makes the moment feel more ethereal, like Moony will evaporate into greenish smoke at any moment.

The room feels like it shifts with Sirius in it, meandering around the seating pits, but he keeps his eyes fixed on Moony as he draws closer. Sirius gets within arm’s reach when he realises Moony’s eyes are closed and is filled with a sudden panic at the idea of him opening them. What if he doesn’t remember Sirius? What if he’s been thinking of this since that night and nothing happens now? What if Moony remembers and yet he still doesn’t want anything to do with Sirius? Had they danced just because Sirius was around? Was that the half-blood way of apologising for bumping into someone?

Oh, but then Moony’s eyes open—yellow-amber and muzzy, blurred—and he looks at Sirius stood just near him and his face blooms and waxes into the most beautiful smile Sirius has ever seen. Sirius’ heart leaps and pounds in his throat and he offers a smile back, a little shrug of his shoulder to hide the fact he’s practically run over here and has spent the last two days thinking of only him.

Moony holds a hand out to Sirius and Sirius notes with a pang of… _something_ that there’s a scrape across his knuckles. He doesn’t seem to care though and Sirius slides his fingers into Moony’s palm and it’s warm, so warm. Perhaps there’s a flicker of something in his amber-yellow eyes a moment before Sirius takes his hand; a moment of apprehension and doubt at the scuffed, bloody skin over his fingers, but Sirius doesn’t think on it and then the expression is gone and it’s okay.

Sirius lets Moony pull him closer and dances to the music with him. The beat is in rapid, off-beat syncopation with Sirius’ own heartbeat as he looks at Moony, only an inch shorter than him maybe but feeling so much taller with the way he smiles like he’s in control of the situation. Moony’s eyes are so bright and he’s fuzzy and unfocused but he’s _so beautiful_. His nose is crooked and smattered with freckles and his smiling mouth is quirking beneath that little scar that catches the light. Sirius dances because it’s harder _not_ to dance with Moony dancing like that, holding his hand, and the music is in his veins, turning him boneless and he wants to live up to something. He wants to feel like he fits in here, so he dances.

Moony seems pleased with Sirius dancing; one of his hands is on Sirius’ shoulder and other is still holding onto Sirius’ and he’s smiling, half-cut, twinkling with starlight. Sirius thinks he should say something, but he’s jittering with the Pep from Benjy and he doesn’t know _what_ to say, or if you should try and have a conversation whilst dancing. Part of him, regardless, wants to just be with Moony and be close to him, to try and drink this in case he gets torn away again, somehow. He wants to memorise the way Moony looks, his eyes half-closed as he moves and sinks into the music.

Emboldened—it’s the Pep, does it do that?—Sirius puts one hand on Moony’s arm as they move together. It’s quieter in this room, less people pressing around them than the main room the other night, so Sirius feels less claustrophobic, but his heart is still hammering. Moony doesn’t flinch under his touch—_that’s_ a novelty—and just squeezes Sirius’ shoulder in response, his thumb over the tendons atop the bones. He seems… at ease. He seems to breathe in this place like it is sunlight and he is a wilting flower and his dreamy smile is ethereal as he and Sirius dance together.

Perhaps Sirius should be worried by how _not_ strange this feels. Perhaps he should care he’s dancing with the perfect stranger he’s been thinking about for 48 hours straight and how _not-normal_ and unacceptable it is to be dancing like this but he doesn’t care. He’s happy, he’s buzzing and trembling with Pep and the excitement and apprehension of seeing Moony and thinking about the taste of his mouth. Sirius dances with Moony as the songs change, delighting at the fuzzy smile Moony gives him when a new song strikes up and he must recognise the opening chords even though it all sounds the same to Sirius.

In the refrain of the song, all breathy vocals and still, still that bass that reverberates up Sirius’ leg-bones, Moony leans in and presses his mouth to Sirius’ ear. The puff of hot air that hits Sirius’ skin before he speaks makes him break out into goosebumps. “I’m Remus.”

_Remus_. Not Moony. But Remus. Sirius thinks of the classics and Remus and Romulus and Rome, of Italy and the escape of it and the stories Alphard has told him of the country. Remus sounds exotic and full of promise and it’s exciting but _terrifying_ because Sirius doesn’t think he can quite breathe properly.

Remus pulls back and smiles at Sirius, his head tilted a little. The scar that skirts his lip catches the sprawling silver light in the room. He’s smiling like there’s a secret he’s desperate to tell Sirius and Sirius can hear his voice echoing in his head with the name Remus, Remus, _Remus_.

Sirius leans in, his hand sliding up Remus’ bicep beneath his t-shirt, and goes to whisper in Remus’ ear. He’s spinning and jittering and misjudges the depth in the low light and presses his mouth to Remus’ ear and his skin tastes like smoke and promises. “I’m Sirius.”

“I’m sure you are,” is Remus’ lightning fast reply, accompanied by a wry little smirk that Sirius wants to see more of.

“That’s an old joke,” Sirius replies, barely able to contain the laughter bubbling up out of his throat.

Remus responds with a wide smile that shows his crooked canine and it only highlights the crookedness of his nose and the way his smile is ever so slightly lopsided but he’s _beautiful_. Sirius is still laughing at the awful joke, shivering with it and the Pep lingering behind his teeth and _Salazar_, that stuff must be _something_ because everything looks perfect and Sirius never wants to leave. _Remus_ looks perfect.

“Old but good,” says Remus, sniggering with laughter, his upper arm shaking under Sirius’ grip where he keeps a hold of Remus like they’re going to be torn away from each other again. Sirius doesn’t want that, he wants to lace them together and never leave this place or him.

Sirius nods. He has to because he’s laughing because Remus has just told him an awful joke and they’re still dancing and Remus’ hand is on Sirius’ shoulder. “It’s good.” Sirius thinks he’s never laughed this much before, not with the same lifting, buzzing sensation in his chest—he’s laughed before, when he played a prank on their Charms tutor, but it was always accompanied by an undercurrent of fear, that Orion will catch them.

Remus bites his lip around a smile that looks like secrets before he leans in to Sirius’ side. His hand from Sirius’ shoulder slides up to thumb a curl of Sirius’ hair out the way of his ear so Remus can whisper, “You’re cute when you laugh.”

Sirius shivers and grips tighter onto Remus’ hand. He’s unsure if there’s something he should say back to something like that. He turns his face a little and the whorls of hair behind Remus’ ear smell like cigarettes and Lily’s sweets and maybe Pep too or those fizzy drinks. He smells, feels, tastes, looks—with those flashing colours across his moonlight-drenched skin—like he is made of the same stuff as the club around them. As if they share the same building blocks and glorious beginnings and endings, the same things that make Sirius feel like he has found his place and he will trek across London in bare feet on broken glass for this.

Sirius’ lips curl upwards into a smile. “You’re beautiful,” says Sirius, the words slipping and tripping over his tongue like they’re on Pep too and they have too much energy and can’t stay in the confines of his mouth. Is it a stupid thing to say? Is it too much or too fast or has he embarrassed himself? But Remus just hums something into the space behind Sirius’ ear—he’s stayed pressed there even when they’re not talking and Sirius can’t _breathe _for how close he is—and slides his hand down Sirius’ side to anchor at the line of his waist. The touch sears and Remus brings them closer together so they dance _together_.

Remus is just an inch or so shorter than Sirius and it’s just the right height to stare into his amber-yellow eyes and Remus stares back, cloudy and unfocused but uncaring for the eye contact. Sirius has always been told direct eye contact is insolent and he only does it to his mother to provoke her but here, _here_, in _Destination_, Remus holds his gaze like it’s made of glass and he’s frightened it will break. Sirius wonders if he looks blurry and unfocused to Remus with the way the colours are swimming and shifting in his eyes, but Remus’ lips are smiling and they look beautiful.

The songs slide past them, changing and melding together and Sirius doesn’t recognise a single chord but he barely hears them anyway, too focused on Remus’ little lopsided smile and the softness of his eyes. There’s another scar, he notices, disappearing down beneath the neck of Remus’ shirt. It flickers with the passing silver-white lights in the room and tempts Sirius to explore it with his mouth. It’s a thought that comes unbidden into his mind and he’s shocked by the voracity of it. His previous kisses with that Flint girl and that Carrow boy seem to pale in comparison to the need shaking through him. He wants to dance with Remus until the club closes at dawn and he wants to kiss him in the honeyed morning light and feel the copper of Remus’ curls between his fingers.

Instead, caught by a sudden pang of both longing and disappointment, Sirius voices what has been bubbling in his throat since he saw Remus across the room. He leans in and Remus’ thumb strokes across Sirius’ ribs like he’s polishing something tarnished up to be treasured. “I’m sorry about the other night.”

His tongue feels loose and feather-light, like there’s a link missing somewhere between his brain and his mouth. Cousin Andi says their mothers get like this, when they talk too much after too much gin and maybe this is what being drunk is like. He doesn’t mind it. He likes how free he feels and how close he is to Remus’ body, as if they’re sharing body heat.

Remus raises an eyebrow. He stares for Sirius a moment, his yellow-amber eyes flickering over Sirius’ face—he thinks they might linger on his mouth—before looking back to his eyes. “I thought I’d done something wrong.”

Sirius stares for a moment. He’s used to words having double meaning, used to having them twist and jab at him and expect something else or read some underlying current into the words. Remus seems honest, though, staring at Sirius with a sort of resigned pain in his eyes. When Sirius realises Remus really did think he’d left him high and dry, Sirius shakes his head frantically and his hair slides over his shoulders and around his neck.

“No, you didn’t… you didn’t.”

“You were there one minute, gone the next,” Remus retorts. Sirius wishes he could see the other boy’s expression but he can only see a slice of it in his periphery with how they are murmuring into each other’s ears.

“I _know_. I—” He’s going to sound crazy, isn’t he?— “I was, honestly, there one minute gone the next. I don’t know what happened. Like I touched a Portkey.”

Remus’ thumb stays stroking over Sirius’ ribs, over the warmth and solidity of him, shoring him up and pressing them closer. After a moment he slides his palm further around Sirius’ side and to the dip of his spine. “Like a Portkey?”

“Yeah.” Sirius swallows and his lips graze over Remus’ ear; hot skin that seems so intimate that Sirius shivers and he _knows_ Remus feels it. That feels too easy; Sirius has just floated a wild suggestion to a complete stranger and he has swallowed it whole. Is that just Remus, he wonders? Or is it the club full to the brim with strangeness? Or the Pep and the cigarettes and the fizzy, kaleidoscope drinks. The next sentence seems as easy as Remus’ acceptance of a reasoning Sirius didn’t even fully understand himself. “I didn’t… didn’t want to leave you.”

“No?” Remus bites his lip around a smile again—it’s endearing, _oh_, so endearing—and his thumb strokes over the white-bone ladder rungs of Sirius’ spine beneath his shirt, hand hooked beneath his jacket. The colours in the room shift again, like the sweeping of searchlights looking for something amongst the bodies. Sirius isn’t aware of anything else. He thinks of Remus and their closeness and nothing more. Lily and James could be dancing next to them, Caradoc and Benjy laughing at the (probably) starstruck expression on Sirius’ face but he doesn’t care. He’s drunk—he must be, with the fizzy drinks and the Pep—and he just wants to be with Remus.

“No. I was having fun, dancing with you,” says Sirius, smiling too. He rests his forearm on Remus’ shoulder, would cross wrists with his other hand if Remus wasn’t still holding onto it, fingers linked.

Remus squeezes their linked fingers. “Me too.” He pulls back to peer at Sirius with those frosted-glass eyes and they seem to clear for a moment, wiped free of their haze of drink and spelled-sweets and whatever else Remus does here that Sirius knows nothing of. “Don’t go disappearing on me again.”

A surprised bubble of laughter hiccups out of Sirius’ lips at the frankness in Remus’ voice, disbelieving that Remus could want his presence despite them knowing each other for a handful of minutes, and _knowing_ seeming like an exaggeration. Still, the idea of Remus wanting him to _stay_ buttresses nicely against the bit of Sirius that craves affection and has been thinking and _dreaming_ of Remus for two nights. Before he can stop himself, shivering with Pep and Remus’ touch, he leans forward to press his mouth against Remus’.

It’s only quick, a hot, dry press of their lips together mingled with smoke and reverberating bass. Remus makes a soft noise in the back of his throat, surprise perhaps but cut with something deep and molasses-sweet. When Sirius pulls back with fluttering eyelids and hammering heart, Remus’ head is cocked slightly. He leans back in, slowly, like he’s scared of spooking Sirius like a wild horse, and kisses him properly.

Sirius’ fingers dig into Remus’ shoulder as their lips meet and he feels warm all over by the contact. He doesn’t know what to expect, it’s nothing like the kisses he’s had before, shot through with fizzy drinks and smoke but Remus is so gentle and coaxing. His lips part in soft, indolent passes over Sirius’ mouth, urging him to kiss back, gentle, soft, kind, coaxing, full of breath and smiles. Sirius wonders if he should be embarrassed by his woeful kissing technique but then Remus makes a soft little murmur of a noise into his mouth and Sirius thinks he _must_ be doing something right. Remus’ palm is stroking up and down Sirius’ back in time with the bass of the song and the breath in and out of his lungs.

Sensation fizzles down Sirius’ spine and gathers in the basin of his pelvis as he slowly, so carefully, smooths his fingers up the gentle slope of Remus’ neck to press inquisitively in the soft, downy hair at the nape of his neck. Remus squeezes their joined hands for a moment before he lets go of Sirius’ hand and cups his fingers, gentle-light, at the hinge of Sirius’ jaw.

It’s then Sirius wishes he didn’t have to breathe, because he’s getting light-headed and his knees feel weak and his skin is prickling all over like the most pleasant Stinging Hex he’s ever encountered. Sirius keeps his fingers in Remus’ hair as he pulls back just enough to gulp a warm, heady breath. He can’t keep the giddy smile from his lips.

Remus thumbs over the hollow of Sirius’ cheekbone, the shallow-carved shadow accentuated by the lighting, and smiles himself. When their eyes meet, amber-yellow-grey, Remus’ smile splits into a grin and he huffs a little laugh that alights the top of his cheeks with colour. Sirius has never seen a more beautiful sight in his whole life and he’s sure, in that moment then, that Remus’ laugh will play in relief against his eyelids until his dying day. He hasn’t had any of Lily’s Levies but he feels like he is floating, this strange lightness hooking in his chest, between his ribs, tugging him up, up, up to the sky.

“Don’t go anywhere,” Remus says, his voice sounding soft and a little hoarse.

“I won’t, I won’t.” Sirius has to concentrate to string the words together, force his grinning mouth to make the syllables when all it wants is to smile and kiss Remus again. He wets his lower lip, eyes flickering over Remus’ face—his eyes, wide pools of amber, foggy with substance, his slightly crooked nose, even more crooked smile—and rubs his thumb over the tendon of Remus’ neck. He wants to know all of Remus’ little places.

Remus’ hand on his back is still guiding them to dance, moving from side to side and against each other, limbs tangled. Sirius doesn’t even have to think about dancing; his body is just doing it for him,wrists crossed behind Remus’ head, Remus’ hands on his back, heat through his shirt, gentle pressure keeping him grounded. Sirius just wants to kiss him again. So, because tonight he’s drunk and his body seems oddly out of his control, Sirius closes the gap and kisses Remus again.

Sirius can feel Remus’ smile against his lips as Remus pulls him gently closer and encourages Sirius’ kiss with the soft part of his lips. Sirius really _doesn’t_ know what he’s doing but he just sinks into Remus’ arms as an anchor to the near unbearable lightness fizzing in his chest. He doesn’t want to think about how kissing Remus might feel on Levies, that lightness piqued and pulled like a plastic bag in a breeze.

Caught up, Sirius issues a little gasp as Remus parts their lips and slides the tip of his tongue along Sirius’ bottom lip. Sirius’ mouth is a little chapped from the way he plucks mindlessly at his bottom lip and he wonders for a moment if he ought to be embarrassed. Then, on his gasp, Remus’ tongue presses and curls against Sirius’ and Sirius melts into tiny pieces, like the wax of a candle, sinking into Remus. Remus’ kisses make Sirius forget everything else, make him forget about _Destination_ and everything he loves here, because here is Remus’ mouth and it makes Sirius feel like he is flying.

The songs change and Sirius forgets to pay attention to whether he recognises the next one. He just wants to keep kissing Remus, fingers in the curls at the back of his head, mouth gentle-soft and inquisitive because he's _never_ kissed like this before. Remus keeps up slow circles with his thumb at the dip of Sirius’ lower back, his other hand delving carefully into the strands of hair tucked behind Sirius’ ear. It feels like Remus’ attention is all on him, and Sirius has never had that before. The only two other kisses he's had were awfully awkward, half-listening for a noise in the hallway, ready to spring apart at any moment. That's not the case here. Remus is holding Sirius like he never wants to let him go, kissing him like it's the only thing he wants. Sirius can be himself here and drink and dance and let go and kiss the boy he wants to kiss without the threat of his mother looming over him.

Remus pulls back from their kiss with a smile on his pink lips. His amber-yellow eyes flicker like warm sunlight over Sirius’ face, his fingers stroking through the ends of Sirius’ hair. He smiles wider, teeth raking his bottom lip, and Sirius realises he's a little out of breath. They're _both_ out of breath, and Sirius sort of likes it like that. He feels swept up and spat out in a different universe. Maybe that's what _Destination_ does.

“I could do this all night,” Sirius admits, a flush colouring his cheeks at how readily the words are springing from his tongue under the guise of the night.

“As much as I would like that,” Remus says, his voice soft as he murmurs in Sirius’ ear, “I need to sit down a minute. Come with me?”

Sirius nods, slightly elated that Remus hadn't come up with some reason to leave Sirius alone after such an awful kiss. Or multiple kisses, he supposes, with a giddy rush to his stomach. “Yes, yeah.”

Remus leans in for another brief kiss that Sirius meets him halfway for, as if they can’t put each other down. Sirius doesn’t _want_ to put him down, he doesn’t want to leave, he wants to stay at _Destination_ forever. Remus runs his fingertips down the inside of Sirius’ arm to squeeze his wrist briefly. “If I get us a drink, do you want to find a seat?” Remus’ fingers stay searing on Sirius’ wrist.“I want…” Remus pauses, his thumb stroking the rhythm of the song over Sirius’ alabaster-blue veins. “I want to know everything about you, Sirius…”

“Yeah,” Sirius breathes, tongue wetting his bottom lip. His lips feel tingly and pleasantly numb. “Yeah, I want that too, Remus.”

Remus nods and squeezes once more at Sirius’ wrist before dropping it, starting off through the crowd towards the bar. Sirius watches him through the throngs of people, watching the sweeping silver lights glint off the copper strands of his hair, filaments and vein lines, like lifelines and lifeblood.Sirius watches him move like a jungle cat through the greenery, like this is his hunting ground and Sirius once again feels like predator and prey at once. At the edge of the dance-floor, Remus pauses and looks back over his shoulder, his amber-yellow eyes scanning for Sirius, as if he was expecting him to have disappeared.

Sirius catches his eye and nods, as if to say, _I’m here_. It feels as if the room clears out between them, as if the crowds part like the sea, a path from Remus to Sirius, a rope tying them together. Sirius feels a tug behind his navel, holding Remus’ gaze. _I’m here. I want to stay with you, stranger. You I know nothing of and yet it feels, somehow, like you know my soul. It feels like I have known you forever. We’ve said a handful of words to each other but now I want to know everything about you and learn the taste of your past on my tongue._

Heaving a shuddering breath, Sirius watches Remus turn back towards the bar, feeling, stupidly, absurdly, hilariously, like there is a piece of him going with Remus. He watches a moment longer, his gaze leaping around trying to drink in this environment, before he turns to find a place to sit.

The little sunken seating pits dotted around the room have those privacy charms cast around them, Sirius realises, when his foot slips over the edge of one and the music goes dim in his ears and he can hear the soft rustle of conversation from the occupants. When he rights himself and steps out again, the music is back to full volume and Sirius continues on, looking now for an empty one of these areas. He spots one tucked away towards the back wall, behind some of the sweeping silver lights, perhaps a little more private. Sirius’ insides leap at that idea of sitting there with Remus.

He skirts around towards the seating area, weaving through the crowds and hoping Remus would find him. He hopes Remus realises Sirius will go for a seat—he seems very smart—and will find him there. The room isn’t big, and there’s only a handful of seats, maybe seven or so, so there’s only so many places Remus will have to look before he finds him.

The moment Sirius steps down into the seating area there’s a snapping pull behind his navel. He wavers slightly and blinks and when he opens his eyes his feet are hitting pavement.

Pavement.

Bewildered, Sirius whips his head around to see a country lane behind him, the back gardens of a few houses, the lights all off inside. He’s out in the London air, with the dawn peeking over the hills… Except it’s not London. It’s… Sirius doesn’t know _where_ he is. There’s hills and greenery and Sirius spins on the spot, once, twice, to try and recognise _anything._

“What…?” He breathes to himself, looking down at his body like it might explain things to him. He’s in the same clothes. His jacket smells of Benjy’s Pep-laced cigarette and—and Remus’ cologne. When Sirius touches his fingers to his lips they tingle with the remnants of Remus’ kisses.

How did he get here? He was at _Destination_ a moment ago, waiting for Remus. Waiting for Remus to come back with a drink so they could sit and talk and find out everything about each other. He’d said, he’d promised! He’d said he’d not go anywhere, and now? Now he’s _here_, wherever here is, and Remus is not.

“No, no no!” Sirius runs a hand through his hair and turns on the spot, there’s a few houses on this stretch of road but no one watching, so he closes his eyes and tries to concentrate. Sirius has learned to Apparate of course, he’d been forced to learn quickly by his father, with the terror of almost Splinching himself as the metaphorical hound snapping at his heels to ensure he did it right. He doesn’t do it often, it’s tiring and never perfect, and there’s no need in London where the infrastructure is well established enough for the various Floo Points. But there’s no Floo Points here and so Sirius thinks hard and imagines Elgin Avenue, London.

Apparation isn’t quite like a Portkey, it’s like squeezing yourself into a dark tube and being spat out at the other end. Sirius stumbles to the alley in Elgin Avenue and gives himself a cursory once-over to make sure he still has all of his extremities. He’s barely got his bearings when he starts down the street to retrace their steps from earlier, _left, left, straight, right, straight_.

But there’s no neon doorway, nothing slides to life along the dingy wall at the junction of Elgin Avenue and Grittleton Road. Nothing. Dawn is colouring the buildings a pinkish orange and Sirius remembers Lily telling him _Destination_ closes at dawn. Maybe it’s already closed, maybe it lets people out in a different place than they arrive. Sirius scrapes both hands through his hair. _No, no, no!_ He wants Remus, he wants to dance with him and sit next to him and trade small talk and secrets and tell him his whole life story.

Stupidly, Sirius feels tears stinging at the corners of his eyes. _No, no, no._ He has something beautiful to hold onto all of a sudden, and he wants to keep a hold of it. Sirius doesn’t want to give this up. What was happening? Why did he keep getting kicked out? Could the club tell, he wondered, that he was a Pureblood, that his family were obsessed with purity, that they would kill him for going there? Maybe the club didn’t _want_ a member of the Noble and Most Ancient House of Black in it, maybe it wanted him gone, maybe Sirius would be tarnished by his family’s reputation his whole life.

This strange, heavy sense of despair and longing settles over Sirius like a thick blanket, cancelling out Benjy’s Pep and the lightness of Remus’ kisses like Lily’s Levies but so much sweeter. Disheartened, Sirius walks all the way back to Grimmauld Place with his hands shoved in his pockets. Regulus is at the scullery door for him and steals him upstairs, but he only has time to change his clothes before he has to go down to meet Orion. He’ll be unfathomably angry that Sirius skipped out on dinner, but Sirius thinks it’s worth it for the memories of _Destination_, and of Remus.


	6. Chapter 6

Sirius’ days fall into rote, mindless, mechanical segments. He wakes in the morning to Kreacher or Regulus and stumbles downstairs to listen to Orion talking about what is expected of him in the family business. Or he is accosted by Walburga and screamed at until his eardrums feel as if they are bursting. They are always unfathomably angry, but they no longer hold sway over him.

Walburga’s screams do not frighten him anymore, Orion’s threats fall on deaf ears. The Cruciatus is a bump in the road towards his end goal, the Imperius Curse something he can wriggle out of with the thought of _Destination_ in his mind.

It has been four days and Sirius has gone to _Destination_ every night, pressed his way through the crowds to try and find Remus amongst them. He finds Marlene one night, her eyes surrounded in smoked purple and a new ring through her nose. Sirius is distracted, looking for Remus, eyes only for him, to try and find him, to apologise for leaving when he had said (when his soul still says) _I’m not going anywhere_. Sirius doesn’t find him that night, despite looking all night, despite getting a hit of a Pep-laced cigarette from Marlene in the courtyard and stumbling around with boundless, limitless energy all night. He looks and looks, for moon-drenched skin and the way Remus moves, sinuous and slow, but he doesn’t find him.

The fifth night, woozy from the Cruciatus Walburga had thrown his way after _another_ argument, another scream of _you will do as expected!_ when Sirius does not cow to her scare tactics, Sirius stumbles along to the location on the coin, his legs and feet aching from the walk. The idea of _Destination_ is like armour to him; he stands, thinking of Remus’ warm smile and Lily’s Levies and Marlene’s sparkling little drinks, to pull him out of the horrors and ignore his mother until he can escape. Sirius stands, smile placid, straight backed—she can’t curse him for that—hands clasped behind him, as she screams in his face. Walburga levels her wand at him and says, “You will not get what you want, Sirius, so _behave. _Stop trying to _rebel_, stop trying to act out and refuse your heritage.”

Sirius grits his teeth and thinks of Remus’ kisses tingling his lips and by the time he is in _Destination_ that night he is searching for Remus, he thinks he might starve without the taste of his mouth. He finds Lily, Marlene and Caradoc by the bar but only stops to wave before wading through the crowds. He wants to find Remus. He wants to dance with him and kiss his wry smile and slide his hands over Remus’ shoulders and crowd close to him. He wants to kiss the arch of his eyebrow and the dip between tendons down his throat and his abdomen when it moves with the music.

The club seems even more sprawling and dense tonight. He walks through one room flooded with red light, with music more like white noise than anything melodic. Then, a maze of corridors that has Sirius convinced he’s walked past the same wizarding photograph of a group of people dancing at least three times. At last he emerges into another room, with tall tables to stand at or perch on equally tall stools. This rooms looks like a place for quiet conversation. There’s quiet music in the background, something akin to what Sirius recognises from home, with strings or a brass melody, and the idea that anything here in _Destination_, in his haven, can remind him of his home makes acid rise in Sirius’ throat. He wants out.

Another doorway is behind a velvet curtain and he pushes that open to emerge, blinking, into a room filled with strobe lighting. It’s full of people and Sirius begins to skirt around the edges, looking for Remus, for curly hair and loose limbs. Through another doorway, down a corridor with tiles polished to a shine on the walls so that Sirius sees his reflection in them, then out again. He recognises this room; he’s come full circle to the main dance-floor, somehow.

“Oi,” comes a voice from behind Sirius, a hand going to his arm to pull him as he walks past a crowd. “Sirius, hey.” Lily’s hair is in two buns on top of her head and her parting is sprinkled with glitter. Her fingernails are blooming in different colours on Sirius’ arm and he’s forever shocked by the extent of spells his friends here know. He used to think half-bloods didn’t learn any magic, but that’s so far from the truth. Lily cocks her head. “Come on, we’re over here.”

“I’m looking for someone, Lily,” Sirius says, plucking at his bottom lip with thumb and forefinger whilst Lily manoeuvres him through the crowd.

Lily shoots him a smile over her shoulder and Sirius notices the glitter is atop her bare shoulders too. “Your boy? The one with the scar?”

“Yeah…” Sirius breathes, though his reply is lost in the music.

Lily emerges first into a corner where a few people Sirius recognises are gathered. He waves hello to Marlene, to Caradoc, to Fabian, to the red-lipstick girl he still doesn’t know. Fabian floats a drink over to Sirius with a flick of his wand and Sirius catches it, nodding thanks to the redhead. This group of people have taken him in now, christened him with their drinks and the glitter that Sirius notices lingering around the cuffs of his jacket. He feels at home, welcomed into their fray, with drinks and Levies—he plucks one of those from Lily’s palm.

Sirius dances with Marlene, floating free and rising onto the tips of his toes with the Levies, the lightness that strings up through his limbs. He dances with Fabian and Caradoc, his arm around their shoulders, thinking of singing along to lyrics he doesn’t know, following the shape of their smiling mouths like their happiness is infectious.

All at once Sirius remembers he’s here for Remus. It’s so easy to get distracted with the group, with something so full of life and energy when he is so devoid of both away from this place. But then he remembers Remus and saying _I won’t go anywhere. I want to know everything about you_. He wants to find him, somewhere, in this undulating, crawling, changing mass of rooms and bodies, somewhere. He slips out of the group, shrugging off an arm around his shoulder (it’s red-lipstick girl, perhaps, Dor-something) and sets out through the crowd again. This place feels like the _only_ place to be if you’re a wizard, so Remus _has_ to be here.

The crowd feels like one beast, moving and writhing together. Sirius feels like every wizard in London must be here, but even then he didn’t think there were that many of them. He stands on his toes, glad for his height, looking through for that curly hair or that particular way of moving.

He sees it, through the crowd, through people that seem determined to get in his way. The lights flash red, blue, green, silver, purple, blue again, red, blue, then—_then,_ copper and brown. Remus’ hair glints in the light and Sirius shoves his way through towards him.

“Remus!” Sirius calls but it’s lost within the swell of the music.

At a doorway, Remus pauses and looks back, as if he’s looking for something. Sirius pushes forward and he’s only ten or so feet away when Remus locks eyes with him. Sirius smiles, feels it pull at his face in earnest, like he’s never smiled this way before, so open and honest (maybe he hasn’t).

Remus doesn’t smile back.

Sirius frowns, stopping dead in his tracks of running towards Remus like it is his only purpose. What? Remus looks at him, sees him, he’s sure. His eyes are maybe glassy, like they usually are, hazy with substance, but he sees Sirius and looks at him and almost looks _through_ him. His amber-yellow eyes aren’t so warm anymore

“Remus? Remus!” Sirius started forward again, his feet released from the quicksand of shock only a moment after he was drawn there. “Remus, I didn’t run off, I—”

Sirius’ calls are swallowed whole by the sounds of the crowd and the music that swells along with them. Sirius shoves through the crowd after Remus, ricocheting from one side to the other of the path he’s carved between them, his shoulder colliding with one person, his elbow the next, his foot caught on someone’s shoe in his haste to appear on the other side of the room. Sirius’ gaze is fixed on Remus, the back of his head, his hair catching copper as he’s walking away from Sirius, through a large archway into the darkened room beyond.

Sirius shoves and stumbles, emerging at that archway and when he ducks through it’s—there’s a breeze. There are people all around Sirius but they aren’t in _Destination_, he realises. He’s outside, on the street, with people swarming around him, babbling excitedly. Sirius blinks then clenches his eyes shut. _Why does this keep happening?_

Did he think so hard about getting to the other side of the room that he’d tried to Apparate and now he’s here? Sirius pats his hands over his torso, no Splinching, no pain, but he has no clue where he is, and he wants to see Remus! He wants to explain what’s going on, even though he doesn’t know himself. The crowd sweeps Sirius along and it gradually disperses on the corner of the street. Sirius realises he’s in Hammersmith, too far from _Destination_ tonight when it was somewhere in Brixton at sunset.

In a daze, he follows the Muggle crowds from the Apollo to the tube station, happy to find there’s a Floo point there—must be a popular station. He’s too tired to Apparate, drunk on Marlene’s drinks and Levies and maybe he’d had a drag of a Pep cigarette from Caradoc too, he doesn’t remember. Sirius only thinks of Remus as he joins the Floo queue, thinks of his cold eyes and his frown, his look of disappointment. He thinks Sirius left him voluntarily, he thinks Sirius doesn’t want him but it couldn’t be further from the truth. Sirius wants to _scream_ he’s so frustrated and bewildered. His heart is swelling and fit to burst with the rush of emotion, he wants Remus, he wants to understand and explain but he can’t. He knows nothing of the boy, can’t find any way to speak to him except trail around _Destination_ at night like a ghost in the ever-sprawling, twisting building, looking for love.

Two days later, Sirius heals the burn across his shoulder from his mother’s cursing, peering in the bathroom mirror. He’s been out every night, looking for Remus, and when he cannot find him, he dances and drinks and takes Levies with the others, with Marlene’s arm around his waist and Fabian ruffling his hair. He feels accepted with the group, like they are his home and his _friends_ and he’s never had anything so novel, but Sirius thinks he’d much rather be with Remus, his arms around Remus’ middle and his mouth pressed against Remus’, electrifyingly sweet.

He decides, staring in the bathroom mirror, that he’s had enough. It feels like he’s had the very thing he wants dangled in front of him then ripped away. Sirius knows he’s a Black, he knows he has the countless, awful weights of every single thing his family has done pressing on his shoulders. He has the dead house elves heads on the stairs, the smiles his father gives when there are Muggle deaths reported, the pride his mother has at the silverware in the parlour that ‘fixes’ any half-bloods that touch it the old-fashioned way—by draining half their blood. Sirius knows he doesn’t _deserve_ happiness, being a Black and all, refusing to be the son his parents want. Every way he turns Sirius is met with awful choices; to be everything he is meant to be but cannot and ignore the guilt and weight in his stomach, or to rebel against the people who brought him into this world and try to hold on to what little morality he has gleaned and coaxed into life in Number 12 Grimmauld Place. He wants to escape, he wants _Destination_ and acceptance and a chance to be his own person.

Back in Sirius’ bedroom, James’ latest letter sits on top of his dresser. It’s all thinly veiled talk, as all their letters have been since James discovered his letters are read and burned if they aren’t full of blithe Transfiguration discussion. The letter arrived yesterday, and Sirius reads between those lines to hear James saying he is going away with his parents, for a week to a place Sirius’ doesn’t recognise. So Sirius went to _Destination_ alone last night, and he’ll go alone tonight, and the night after, and the night after, until he speaks to Remus and explains it all and gets to taste his kisses again.

Walburga had caught him up early—in truth he’d just come in from _Destination_, but Sirius pretends he’s just awake in the pre-dawn—and shot the curse at him, half-drunk and staggering, before she swept off towards her own rooms. His father is away on business for three days, and that means whilst Sirius’ lessons are on hold, his mother is also away from the reigns Orion usually half-throttles her with. She is at once apathetic and yet invasive, she wants nothing to do with the waste of space once known as her eldest son, and yet she does not want to let him go. Sirius tries to push away her lingering insults and reminds himself that he has a home and people who care for him, now, in _Destination_. Dawn light kisses through the windows and over the made bedspread where Sirius hasn’t slept properly for a few nights now. He’s tired, but he can’t sleep.

Instead Sirius circles around to the library and pulls from the shelves every book that so much as _hints_ at transportation magic; at Apparation, Portkeys, Floo magic, protection spells around boundaries, curtilage curses, anything that might pull him out of one place to another.

Sirius rubs sleep from his eyes and spreads the books out before him, pouring through old indexes and badly formatted contents pages of books far older than he. He’s halfway through one book when he realises that it’s not _every_ night he’s been pulled away from the nightclub. Sirius sits back in his chair with a heavy thud that rocks it onto the back legs then down on four again, floored by the realisation. It dawns, all of a sudden, unlike dawn entirely—which is slow and gentle, pink-tinged—that it’s only when he’s with _Remus_ that he gets pulled away, snatched from the jaws of affection and acceptance that he only gets from the other boy when he’d much rather be swallowed whole by it.

What is it, then? Is it Remus? Something the other boy is doing to keep him away? Or is it the nightclub, or Sirius himself? Something wrong with _Sirius_, adding to that ever-growing list of things wrong with him, things paraded by his mother again and again until Sirius can repeat them back _ad nauseaum._ There are so many variables, so many things it could be, but it’s _something_ about the two of them. As much as Sirius adores James, Marlene, Lily, Benjy, Caradoc and everyone else he’s met at _Destination_, he isn’t pulled away from them. It’s only when it’s he and Remus, only when he feels as if he’s found what he’s been chasing this whole time. Remus isn’t getting pulled away, though, so it’s something to do with _him_, Sirius is sure.

Sirius keeps reading, chin propped on his palm, desperate to find something. He tries to categorise what happens; the tugging sensation behind his navel, stepping from one place to the next, but it’s hard to parse from the drink and the drugs and the singular euphoria Sirius gets from dancing. He can’t quite remember anything properly beyond being with Remus, happy, floating, buzzing, and then _not_, like a wave of ice water shredding through his soul. The books splayed out in front of him gradually pile themselves to his left when they are no longer useful and Sirius’ elbow slides further and further away from him until his head is pillowed upon _Household Protection for the Respected Wizard_.

Dreams do not occur often for Sirius. He thinks perhaps he doesn’t sleep deep enough for them, but it comes in the early morning, here in the library. Sirius isn’t even aware he’s dreaming first, he’s sat at the desk, looking through books, searching almost frantically for something but he can’t remember _what_. Walburga bursts through the door with her wand already drawn. She closes the distance of the library in three strides that eat up the ground, the heat, the light.

_I told you, boy. You give up this foolish, stupid dream of trying to find love. Love does not exist, not for us, not for anyone. You will not find it here, or anywhere else. I will make sure of it._ Her voice doesn’t come from her mouth. It seems to reverberate through Sirius’ skull from the inside, from the marrow of his bones, leeching outwards. She’s levelling her wand at him but it’s not the light of a spell spilling from the tip of it, it’s the absence of light, it’s darkness unfurling from her and crawling and winnowing its way over Sirius. _You will not find love, you’ll behave, you’ll do your duty, you’ll be a good heir and continue the bloodline. You will not find love, I will make sure of it. _The absence of light crawls over Sirius’ skin and into his mouth, his ears, up his nose, over his eyes, gripping tighter, pulling, pushing, tightening.

Sirius wakes suddenly, face pressed against a vaguely gruesome depiction from _Household_ _Protection_ that shows the effects of an anti-Muggle charm in awful detail. He sits up, feeling groggy and off-kilter, realising that he was dreaming. It feels like something Walburga would do; set something upon him, her son, so he is unable to find happiness, to force him into her way of thinking, to do her bidding and only hers because she cannot _fathom_ Sirius being his own person. He is solely a continuation of the Black lineage, nothing else. Walburga would stop at nothing, hexes, curses, bindings, vows, to make sure the lineage and respect of her family continues. Sirius needs to find a way to break it, he can’t have a life like this.

It’s on him then. Sirius draws his wand from his sleeve and flicks it over the pile of books to send them flying back to their proper places. It’s nothing to do with transportation, though that might be the mechanism of it, to put distance between them, to stop Sirius getting what he desires. Instead Sirius pulls down books on curses, on generational afflictions to cast upon your mortal enemies to ruin their livelihood (make his crops fail, his animals barren, a carriage accident, a falling tree on a walk), hexes to impede someone’s magic, on their ability to cast or procreate. Sirius feels dirty picking these books up, furious that they are in the library, there to be seen, displayed almost proudly, and knowing that his Great-Grandfather Cygnus and a hundred other Black family members have probably cast one of these spells judging by the things he has heard over the dinner table.

Hours fly by with Sirius peering into musty books with questionable stains and the strange resonance of hauntings that comes with old things. He thinks of Remus whilst he works, lets the pain of their being apart fester and open in him like a hole to try and combat Walburga’s blackness. Slowly, through hours of work with the memory of dancing with Remus just floating in his periphery like a similar kind of haunting, Sirius realises it’s a Blight. They are a different, old, powerful kind of magic not seen in this modern world Sirius inhabits, with Floo Points and Owl Offices and parchment by the inch. There’s no specific incantation for a Blight because there are no specific Blights; they emerge and twist and transform, from words, from specific, pointed, poisonous intent, with enough vitriol behind them to take form into the real world. The poison of a Blight latches to a person or place, only strengthened and resolved by the repetition of those words, that intention. So many Muggle fairy tales ‘curses’ are actually Blights, squashed to their limited world view to provide an allegory.

Sirius is shaking by the time he lifts his head from the last book. It feels like his skin is crawling and he wants the poison his mother has been feeding him for _years_ out of his body, he wants it _gone_. He flicks through to the index, then the contents, but there’s nothing about _breaking_ Blights here—why would there be? The Blacks inflict things, they take, take, take, like sponges, and break everything in their path, they don’t restore goodness or light.

The whole day has been eaten by research and it’s already growing dim outside by the time Sirius realises there is no real way out of this. Blights have gone on for generations before, if their magic is powerful enough, and his mother has more than enough vitriolic bile to pass on the poison even well after her death. He wants to go to _Destination_ and get drunk and dance and try to find Remus and kiss his sweet mouth to forget all of this.

In the hallway outside the library Sirius passes Kreacher, grumbling about the lack of a real dinner tonight. It usually happens that when Orion is away, Walburga does not host dinner, she does not demand he and Regulus sit in their starched robes. She would rather sit in the second parlour with Aunt Druella and drink starthistle gin. It’s a blessing tonight, because Sirius can slip from the scullery doorway in his leather jacket, with his _Destination_ coin in the pocket.

The map is south of the river tonight, Sirius spots the edge of Clapham Common labelled there. He takes the Floo Point from King’s Cross down to Battersea and walks the rest of the way with his head down. He can’t shake the feeling of this Blight from his veins, knowing it is there now like a parasite in his blood.

_Left, left, straight, right, straight._

The neon doorway is like an oasis in the desert that Sirius runs towards, desperate that it isn’t a mirage. Moody is in the doorway when Sirius yanks it open and gives him a curt nod. Sirius is already making his way to the double doors when he gets the tug behind his navel that admits him to this place, the one place that he feels like himself. He pulls the tie from his hair and lets the crowd of _Destination_ take him. He looks for Lily’s red hair or Marlene’s crop of white blonde or Fabian and Gideon over the crowd, even taller than Sirius’ frame, lanky and lean. He looks for Remus, loose-limbed, languid, amber-yellow eyes and his slow smile that tastes of the world.

Sirius strides through the people, determined, assured because this is his home now and the Blight _will not_ take it from him, not now he can name the blackness in his blood more than Black, more than the title that has hung over him since he was old enough to understand. Sirius gets a drink from the bar in the main room, and another soon after from a small bar in the corner of a dimly-lit, smoke-filled room with walls that seem to crawl. He’s walking through another room, red lights and music that gets under Sirius’ skin, when there are two hands over his eyes. The person pulls him back against their body and their voice winnows into Sirius’ ear over the music.

“Hi, guess who.”


	7. Chapter 7

Sirius spins on the spot, the hands over his eyes moving away. The breath catches in his throat, the fizzing of his drink on his tongue, the reddish smoke of the room around him swirling.

Remus is close, really close, his mouth lifted in a smile, his cheeks flushed. His eyes are _all_ pupil with the barest ring of amber-yellow around them. He looks muzzy and blurry and like Sirius can’t quite focus on him properly.

“Remus…” Sirius breathes, thinking of seeing him a week earlier, thinking of his frown across the room, the way he couldn’t get away from Sirius quick enough.

Remus answers by pressing his mouth to Sirius’, warm and dry but it tingles and Sirius lets out a little breathless noise. When Remus pulls away he’s smiling secretively. “I just learned this new spell, it’s amazing. Here. _Animare._” Sirius feels the point of a wand tap against his forehead and flinches, expecting a curse, but then Sirius feels like he can see _everything_.

Remus’ hair holds a thousand colours, spectrums and shifts that Sirius has never been aware of, never even imagined before now. Struck with the urge to _feel_ those colours, Sirius lifts his hands and strokes his fingers through Remus’ hair. His face turns slack in response and he smiles like syrup and tilts towards Sirius’ touch.

“Merlin…” Sirius breathes, tasting the air, tasting the colours of it and the way the lack of space between them holds everything Sirius has ever wanted. The music shifts and swirls and becomes unimportant because all Sirius can hear is the beating of his own heart and the soft _swoosh_ of breath in and out of his lungs.

Remus laughs, taking Sirius by the forearms and pulling him to dance. “I just wanted to show you. Isn’t it good? Merlin, you look…” His smile is swathes of pink and red that shift under Sirius’ gaze. Sirius wants to chase it and taste it with his mouth and map the way Moony feels against him.

“It’s—ah, it’s amazing…” Sirius wets his suddenly-dry lips. His hands are still in Remus’ hair, forearms resting against his shoulders as they move and dance together. It feels like they’re two halves of one thing right now, the world spinning around them, twisting and writhing. All Sirius wants is this.

“You look—” Remus trails off again, like he doesn't quite know the word to describe whatever it is he's feeling. Sirius knows that well, he feels the same looking at Remus. He looks like a painting or a mirage, like an oasis in the desert, shimmering with heat-lines. His hands are in Sirius’ loose hair and then down over the lines of his jaw and his neck and then his shoulders and they feel like they're everywhere all at once, like Remus’ touch is fire and Sirius is just bundles of kindling, waiting to be ignited, waiting for the flame to catch to set him alight; Salazar, he’s so beautiful and he's touching Sirius. He's flame and fire and this whole new part of existing that Sirius has no idea about and he's _here_ with Sirius.

“Last time,” Sirius blurts, feeling thoroughly disconnected from his body, thinking of Remus’ frown, the downturned corners of his mouth. “You were angry at m—”

Remus silences him with another kiss, sharp and soft at the same time. “It’s okay,” he murmurs, his voice lilting. Sirius is entranced by the look of his eyes from this close, the ring of yellow-amber so beautiful around wide black pupils, filled with constellations and whole universes. Sirius’ fingers are still in his hair, he realises, twisting curls of it around his fingers. “It doesn’t matter, none of it matters. Merlin, look at you, look at you.” Remus’ fingers trail all over the planes of Sirius’ face, down the slope of his nose, the high points of his cheeks, the line between his eyebrows, the bow of his upper lip. “Look at you…”

Sirius thinks he must look something like Remus does right now, made of light and sparkling goodness and everything beautiful. His face shifts and changes and swirls, more gorgeous with every turn. His eyes are stars, nebulas, whole galaxies. He is _everything_ Sirius could ever even imagine wanting, he is the only important thing in the room, he wants nothing more than this, forever. Nothing has ever been more all-encompassing than Remus at this point. Sirius leans up to kiss him, and his mouth tastes like fire and dreams. He holds tight to the shifting, spinning planes of him, kissing him like Remus’ mouth is ambrosia. Salazar, he’s _so_ beautiful.

“I missed you,” Remus mumbles into Sirius’ mouth, his hands skittering all over his upper body. Sirius remembers his dream from that first night—Moony’s hands all over him and he can’t keep up, he can’t catch his breath—and presses closer. He wants all of this, he wants Remus to have missed him. “You left. I fucking missed you, when I wasn’t here. When it was the mo—”

Sirius only realises he’s cut Remus off with a kiss when his voice was lifting up towards the end. He wants to hear the rest of the sentence but he wants to kiss him so much more because he’s _so_ beautiful. All the lights in the room are trailing and spinning, all sunbursts and after effects; light trails are in the shape of Moony’s eyes and his mouth, he sees his face everywhere and it’s _so_ beautiful.

“I missed you,” Sirius hums back. “I didn’t want to leave. I never want to leave you, I want to stay here all the time. Merlin, you’re—you’re so—”

They’re kissing again, dancing close, with Sirius’ hands cataloguing Remus’ frame, the perfect height of his shoulders, the gentle s-bend of his spine. His jumper feels fucking _incredible_ under Sirius’ fingers, like nothing he’s ever felt, like sensation is just bypassing his skin and sinew and muscle and going straight to his brain, straight through the highways of his nerve endings and _all_ he can do is feel.

Sirius kisses Remus and pours his whole soul out through his lips into the other boy’s mouth with gentle passes and pads, pressing and coaxing. Remus’ mouth feels amazing, all of him feels amazing, every plane of him pressed against Sirius’. Sirius feels flayed alive with it, feels torn apart like Remus has his fingers in the spaces between Sirius’ ribs, in the muscles of his heart, in the branches of his lungs, like he’s delving in there with no such concern for things like _skin_. They kiss and dance, arms around each other, breathing plumes of multicoloured smoke through the air between their mouths. Even breathing feels like kissing, pressed close with the taste of Remus’ mouth on the air. The music is in Sirius’ veins, pulling him along on vibrant puppet strings and leaving light trails through his limbs. Hours could’ve gone by and Sirius can’t tell. He just looks into Remus’ eyes, his pupils so wide Sirius nearly sees his own reflection, and thinks of the world, thinks of the universe and how it brought him here, thinks of the journey he’s taken to get here, through London again and again, finding his boy through crowds and crowds. He wants to fasten them together forever, not caring they know nothing of each other, not caring he doesn’t know his last name or who his family are or where he lives, but just that he _knows_ Remus in his bones, in his vibrant veins.

They’re outside suddenly, in one of those courtyards that looks like a room except when Sirius tilts his head back the sky leaps forward into the open air. The moon is _huge_—is that the spell or is it just one of those days—and hangs in the sky like a paper lantern, just passed fullness. The stars around it are glittering and twinkling as if to say _come join us_. Sirius has never wanted to climb into the sky more than now. He wants to climb the tallest buildings and lean over to touch a star and whisper _take me with you_. Instead, Remus grasps his arm and steers him into a dim corner of the courtyard, where he pulls out a battered carton from his pocket. Sirius watches, entranced—he can _see_ the moonlight in Remus, like he’s made of moonlight and it pours up through his insides to make him glow—as Remus lights the cigarette between his lips with the tip of his wand. The plume of smoke between them is bluish grey and tastes of Remus’ mouth when it hits Sirius in the face.

Sirius chases the taste of it with a laugh, leaning forward to kiss Remus again. When he pulls away, the other boy hands him the butt-end of the cigarette and he takes a drag. There’s no Pep in this one, but the smoke tastes divine and holy like this, Remus’ spell still pulling him along through wonder. He kisses Remus again, wanting to do it forever, feeling like he _could_ do it forever.

When Remus pulls away he has a strange, secretive smile on his scar-knicked lips. “Sirius, ah—there’s something you should know about me.”

He’s smiling though, Sirius thinks, so it can’t be _awful_. He already knows the other boy isn’t a Pureblood. Sirius shakes his head, like it doesn’t matter, none of this matters because he can _see_ Remus. If he can tear his gaze away from the other boy’s face he can see his _heart_ sitting beneath his ribcage, beating away there, completely unaware it’s keeping the boy Sirius has been dreaming of for weeks alive. Sirius puts a hand on Remus’ chest—his heart: _ba-dum, ba-dum, ba-dum_—and kisses him again, like he can’t stop, can’t put him down. “I don’t care, whatever it is,” he mumbles against Remus’ lips.

Remus smiles sardonically, tilts his head a little, and pulls back just enough to speak. “I’m a werewolf, Sirius.”

What? Sirius frowns. He knows what they are, of course; his Dark Arts tutor has spoken at length about Dark Creatures and shown Sirius books with drawings and engravings of werewolves, how to spot them, capture them, _kill them_. Remus doesn’t look anything like the werewolves he’s seen in those books, though. Remus looks like a normal boy. He doesn’t even look like a half-blood even though Sirius knows that’s what he is. He just looks like _Remus_. Sirius still wants to kiss him. Why should it matter that Remus turns into a wolf once a month? Sirius knows enough about it, knows about the process, to know it must fucking _hurt_. The Ministry has things in place for werewolves. There’s a whole ward at St. Mungo’s, isn’t there? Sirius remembers his parents being _livid_ about it, and Orion had tried his hardest to block the funding support for the ward, but it didn’t succeed. He’s heard of Wolfsbane, and how it’s offered to werewolves at a reduced rate through that same ward at St. Mungo’s, despite the expense of the ingredients. The Minister—Kingsley Shacklebolt, if Sirius has remembered his name right, Orion had ranted about him often enough—said all wizards and witches required access to potions and care to reduce suffering, including those suffering from lycanthropy. Sirius remembers reading that in the Prophet and thinking that was what compassion looked like; he’d never seen it so vividly before.

In answer to Remus’ admittance, Sirius presses his hand flat against the other boy’s chest. “So? You’re still you,” he mutters, leaning in to kiss him again. Sirius can’t get enough of Remus’ mouth, the warm wetness of it, the way it tastes of smoke and forever and the idea that the morning will never reach them; they can stay in this nighttime, with the sky so close they could climb to it, forever.

Remus kisses back, soft and gentle, for a moment, before his hands fall on Sirius’ broad shoulders and push him back just a little. He’s grinning—his mouth is daubs of red and pink and Sirius feels like he can see the taste of his own mouth there—and they’re both still high as kites, he’s sure, but Sirius doesn’t _care_ about Remus being a werewolf, he just wants to kiss him.

“You’re sweet,” Remus murmurs, his voice husky and soft but it sounds like music and Sirius can feel it in his veins. “It’s…” He shakes his head, cuts himself off as he leans up the inch that separates them to kiss Sirius on the mouth. Their kiss seems a little more frantic now, but maybe it’s the cool air of the night in the courtyard providing such a contrast to the heat of Remus’ lips.

“It doesn’t matter. None of it matters, we’re here,” Sirius breathes between kisses, his hands in Remus’ hair, down his shoulders—they twist and writhe—down his arms, the cut of his back. “You’re made of moonlight, you’re so gorgeous.”

Remus just hums in response, pulls back from Sirius’ mouth—he chases it, just for a moment, the sweet haven of his mouth—and trails kisses down the knife of Sirius’ jaw, to the divot beneath his ear, down the cords of his neck, his throat. “Moonlight?” he whispers into Sirius’ ear, his hands sliding along the bands of muscle at Sirius’ lower back. Sirius’ whole body _sings_.

“Yeah, moonlight,” he retorts, tilting his head to press his mouth against Remus’ temple. The whole world feels light and gorgeous. Remus is somehow ethereal like smoke and sturdy like bedrock, shifting as Sirius clings to him. “You’re made of moonlight Moony, I want to drink it.”

“Mm, I’d like that,” Remus replies, turning his head to catch Sirius’ mouth in a kiss. He _tastes_ like moonlight too, sharp, crisp, cool. Moonlight has never tasted better, the mix of Remus’ cigarette mixing with the constellations.

“Yeah.” Sirius feels overcome with the moonlight, bolstered with it, as he presses Remus back against the wall with a little more firmness than he intends. He just _wants_, he wants to drink in Remus’ moonlight and lap it up, twist it around his fingers to braid it into his very being, make it whole and real.

Remus makes the most _beautiful_ sound when Sirius pushes him against the wall, his hands flying to Sirius’ arms to pull him closer too. Sirius, on instinct, some kind of moonlit, primordial knowledge, slots his knee between Remus’ thighs as they press together, only moments of light and sound and smoke between them. Remus _feels_ beautiful, he feels like Sirius has climbed into the sky and touched stars, dug his fingers into the craters of the moon. He’s never felt more alive. Sirius doesn’t _care_ that they’re in the courtyard, amongst other people and bodies. None of them feel important, he just wants to kiss Remus and press so close that their bodies become one being. That’s what he wants, to be starlight and moonlight together with him.

Sirius knows his brain should focus on the fact that Remus has just told him he’s a _werewolf_, the fact that must’ve been hard to do, that he’s come out and said it to Sirius, because he might want something, might think he’s _worth_ telling. But he can’t focus on it. Every time he tries to grasp the thread of thought it slips away because instead he thinks about the taste of moonlight—Remus’ mouth—or the heavy-light sensation of the music in his veins, or the sight of Remus’ night sky eyes. He should talk to him about his confession but that spell is knitting them both together and all Sirius can see or feel or think about is Remus. He feels like they are part of the same person, somehow, moonlight and starlight.

“Jesus,” Remus murmurs as Sirius tilts his head to the side and maps the other boy’s jaw and neck with his mouth. He’s so beautiful and his skin all over tastes like moonlight. Sirius doesn’t know who this Jesus is, but it sounds like Remus wants this—it feels like Remus wants this with the way his body is pressed and he’s rolling his hips against Sirius’, pressing against Sirius’ knee between his thighs. Sirius doesn’t know where this is coming from, this urge to push Remus against the wall and _growl_ at the way their hips are grinding together at the beat of the music, but he wants it. Sirius is just a bundle of want; he wants this half-blood, this _werewolf_ and he’s not scared about it.

“I love—love kissing you, you’re so—” Sirius mumbles, sucking a kiss into Remus’ throat, the pale moonlight flesh of it (it tastes so good) and laving his tongue over the resulting bloom. He doesn’t know what to do, how to do it, but Remus’ fingers tangle into Sirius’ loose hair and he makes a beautiful little keening noise that Sirius thinks _must_ mean he’s doing something right. Sirius’ hips roll forward against Remus’—his skin is hot and there’s a hardness there that Sirius moans at, the pressure and sensitivity and _friction_ against his own body—and Remus makes another gorgeous noise. Sirius’ knee is between Remus’ thigh and Remus’ thigh is against Sirius’ _groin_—Salazar, Sirius can’t think straight.

Remus’ fingers in his hair tug gently, pulling him back up so Remus can fasten their mouths together in a kiss. Sirius groans into his mouth, nipping his bottom lip, pressing, shifting, _grinding_. Merlin, it’s so perfect, everything is so perfect. Remus’ hands stroke down Sirius’ back and settle in the back pockets of his jeans, against his arse. He moans softly, kissing Sirius back with enthusiasm, with the shining of moonlight and Sirius _wants_.

There’s a burst of light and sound behind them, reminding Sirius they are in a courtyard, surrounded by people, and Remus’ hips are slotted against his. Sirius glances over his shoulder to find the source of the commotion and sees a little scuffle, wands drawn, spells cast. There are people clamouring in and pulling the people apart. Remus’ mouth tips along Sirius’ jawline and over his ear, like the other boy can’t stop kissing him.

“We should—” Remus presses Sirius close, murmuring in his ear. His hips are still rolling against Sirius’, pressing together, his hands on Sirius’ arse, Sirius’ hands in his hair— “Let’s—Wanna go somewhere else? Somewhere quiet?”

“Yeah.” Sirius’ mouth answers before his brain can catch up, tilting his head back to let Remus kiss down his neck. The stars are _so_ close Sirius only just manages to resist reaching up to touch them. “Yeah, yeah I wanna.”

Remus hums in approval and rakes his teeth across Sirius’ earlobe. He shivers with it, bodily, like ice water down his spine. He feels Remus’ teeth, hears the plume of breath over his ear. Everything feels too much, like all of his senses are assaulted by such a simple thing. His body is drawn taut as Remus squeezes the curve of his behind lightly before slipping his hand into Sirius’. “C’mon, this way. We can find a quiet room.”

Something thrills in Sirius’ stomach. _Yes._ He wants somewhere quiet with Remus, to taste the sound of his voice, to look into those amber-yellow eyes and hold him close and memorise the colour of every freckle across the bridge of his nose. He wants this, he wants all of this in a way he’s wanted nothing before. Arousal is simmering slowly beneath Sirius’ skin, humming along his puppet strings to pull him through with Remus.

The rooms twist around them again, Sirius isn’t sure whether he’s walking or _floating_ for how everything feels, for how the walls warp and the ceilings are full of open skies or meadows or forests. Remus is in front of him, holding his hand, leading him through this place like he knows it, like it’s _his_. He’s all lithe and limber, the planes of his back shifting beneath his shirt as he walks, his shoulders straight and back, his legs long, eating up the floor beneath them. Sirius is taller than him, broader shoulders but he’s slender too, that natural teenage ranginess that he hasn’t lost yet, the thing he tries to keep a hold of. Sirius wants to strip the other boy down and learn every way they are different, to match the ways they are the same and memorise every bit of him.

Remus glances over his shoulder as they stride down one corridor, weaving through the pockets of people gathered under wall scones or next to tables. Sirius catches sight of himself in a mirror, where the colours dance and spin, and he pauses just a little to peer at his reflection—is that _him_? He looks so different, his eyes are _wide _and his hair is messy and there’s a purplish bloom on the hinge of his jaw—is that from Remus’ mouth? He lets go of Remus’ hand to rake his fingers through his hair, pushing it away from his face and trying to tame it a little.

When he turns away from the mirror though, to catch up with Remus in the split second they have separated, he’s not in Destination anymore. _Fuck_. The fucking Blight, pulling through his bloodstream and pulling him _away_ from Remus. _Salazar fucking dammit, dammit, dammit!_ Sirius turns back to where the mirror was and it’s the reflective sheen of a shop window, closed this far into the night, the deep midnight black. Sirius thinks he can _feel_ the Blight in him now, in his blood and marrow, making his head spin, pulling him away from what he wants, what he _needs_. It’s so fucking _unfair_. Sirius puts his hands over his face and _screams_ and it draws the attention of a Muggle or two so he shoves his hands in his pockets and starts walking.

The stars seem far away now, Sirius thinks, when everything is drab and grey. He doesn’t know _where_ he is, but he keeps walking, looking for landmarks and places he recognises. His mouth is tingling from Remus’ kisses, his vision swirling with the remnants of the spell Remus cast between his brows. How long has it been? How long ago had Remus put his hands over Sirius’ eyes and said _guess_ _who_ and kissed him with the most beautiful mouth all pink and red daubed? The pavement seemed to be spinning and writhing under his feet and he stumbles a moment or two even though he’s not _drunk_, unless it’s possible to be drunk on kisses and physical contact.

It’s maybe a half hour of walking later than Sirius realises where he is, and it takes another hour to walk home. He thinks about walking back to _Destination_, to try and get back in and find Remus again, but the sun is licking at the horizon and by the time he gets there (where is it tonight? He could barely remember) it would be closed, and he’s never found out _where_ the club spits people out at the end of the night. Is it different every time? He’s sober finally, from whatever it is, the spell, Remus’ mouth, the whole night of freedom, free from the Blight. He will find a way out of it, he _has_ to.


	8. Chapter 8

It’s been three days, Sirius thinks. He’s not sure, frankly. The days have all sort of drowned together into one long droning sound in his ears. He wants _Destination_, he wants _Remus_, feels like the need for him is bubbling up under his skin and making him tense, snappy, angry. It feels like the Blight is sliding over his skin and he’s just struggling to keep it in, keep from _screaming_.

He hasn’t been able to get away, since that night with the spell and all that kissing. He’s been forced into dinner with the rest of the family, sitting straight-backed in an oversized chair. Regulus sat opposite him, trying to ask _What’s wrong? Where have you been? Who are you?_ with looks and gestures to slip under their parent’s radar, kicking him under the table. Sirius just responds with a wry smile and a shrug of his shoulders. Dinner eases past Sirius like one of the boats out of the marina, on the nights when Sirius catches them moving, when the stillness he finds there doesn’t quite reach all the way into the blackness. The days roll into one, Sirius does the work his father has set in his absence, and helps tutor Regulus in a few subjects his mother permits him good enough in to at least offer some assistance. He daydreams often, and night-dreams even more so, of _Destination,_ of the full moon hanging over he and Remus, and wakes up rutting into the mattress, a gasp on his lips. The knowledge he will return there eventually keeps him going.

The next evening, Sirius pretends he’s got work to do, to look through the ledgers Orion had given him before he left, to be the son his parents want him to be. Walburga, thankfully, doesn’t argue—she’s probably another evening planned with Aunt Druella, drinking starthistle gin and talking so loud it filters through the whole house. Sirius shrugs out of his robes after dinner, wishing James was back from his holiday so he could come to _Destination_ too, to help him figure out this Blight. He and James were Mrs. McGonagall’s smartest students, she always said, so together they could do it. Sirius is pulling on his leather jacket—the coin is in his pocket—when there’s a knock at the door.

“Sirius?” It’s Regulus. He’s the only one that knocks, anyway.

“Yeah?” Sirius sits on the edge of the bed, shoving the coin deeper in his pocket and folding his fingers around it to keep it safe.

Regulus pushes the door open, steps in the room and shuts the door behind him. Everything Regulus does is neat little movements, tightly controlled and regimented. Sometimes, Sirius envies him for that.

“Are you going?” Regulus asks, clasping his hands behind his back.

Sirius nods tightly. “Out. Don’t tell Mother.”

Regulus rolls his eyes and makes a noise of disgust. “I wouldn’t. Where are you going? You’re barely here anymore. Came looking for you to play chess day before last.”

“Oh,” Sirius breathes, feeling a pang of regret. He’s been so caught up with _Destination_, with Remus, with Marlene and Lily and Caradoc, that he’s forgotten who he leaves behind here every night. Regulus isn’t a bad kid, he’s just not as headstrong as Sirius, and he has to remind himself of that sometimes. “There’s this place I found, by accident. I…” Sirius almost doesn’t want to share it. He wants _Destination_ and all the beautiful things there to be _his_ and his alone. But he sees the earnest, wide-eyed look on Regulus’ face and he _can’t_. He can’t keep secrets from his little brother. “This nightclub, for wizards. It’s…” Sirius shakes his head, he doesn’t have the words for this. He needs to find Remus. He stands up, straightens his jacket. “Keep an eye on the servant’s staircase for me?”

As Sirius goes to step past his brother, Regulus grabs him by the arm. Sirius’ first instinct is to pull away but Regulus is _strong_. “Take me with you,” he hisses, his blue eyes wide.

Sirius shakes his head. It doesn’t feel safe, not with the Blight, not with Walburga. She will miss Regulus more than she misses Sirius, and if she finds out Sirius has taken Regulus anywhere she’ll punish them both. Sirius can’t do anything to jeopardise him getting to _Destination_; he needs that place like he needs oxygen. “No, I can’t.”

_Something_ flickers over Regulus’ face, Sirius can’t name it, it’s rare enough to see emotions on his brother’s face at all. He doesn’t say anything further though, straightens his spine and nods curtly. Regulus won’t ask twice and something curdles in Sirius’ stomach because he can’t give his brother this. But he feels like his chance of happiness is just _there_ and he needs to do this to have even half a hope of grabbing it. “Sorry—I’m sorry,” Sirius mutters as he moves past his brother and starts for the door to the servant’s staircase.

When he emerges at the other end, he can hear Regulus talking to Kreacher at the other end of the scullery, keeping him distracted. Sirius slips out the door and climbs out over the walled garden. In the moments before Number Twelve slides back out of existence, beyond the perimeter wards, Sirius sees Regulus at the window, his pale face shining there. He feels like he’s leaving his brother, like he might never see him again. He tries to swallow back the acidity of guilt in his throat as he walks out of Islington, then pulls the coin from his pocket.

The map is up near Hampstead, the glowing dot on _Tudor Close_, which Sirius doesn’t know specifically, but James’ _Point-Me_ spell will help, if he needs it. There’s no Floo Points that Sirius knows of up there, and Apparation was always risky in places as crowded as London, with no guarantee that Muggles don’t see, so Sirius starts walking. He shoves his hands in his pockets, wishing he was better with wandless magic so he could cast a warming charm, but he can’t do that and he doesn’t want to pull his wand out when there are Muggles everywhere.

Hampstead takes a while to walk to, and it’s already getting later and later when Sirius ducks into an alleyway to pull out his wand and set it on his palm. He hates using magic in public because his mother always told him Muggles would attack him for it, because they didn’t understand, because they were inferior. But it’s late now, so late, Sirius has been walking for so long, it’s midnight perhaps, or closer to one in the morning, so no one is around. “Point-Me _Tudor Close_,” he whispers, watching as his wand spins to the left then settles with a twang like an arrow loosed from a bow. He shoves his wand back in his sleeve and follows the curve of the road. Tudor Close cuts off just beneath a corner shop still open this late and Sirius strides down there with renewed purpose.

_Left, left, straight, right, straight_. The doorway slides into existence between two shops and a Muggle walks past without even batting an eyelid. Sirius watches them for a moment before he strides over to push the door open.

“Oi! Sirius!” A voice calls just as his hand hits the door. Fear shoots through Sirius for a moment, but it’s likely to be one of his friends. If it were someone who knows him from outside of here they would call him Master Black or Boy. Thankfully, he turns and it’s Caradoc, tall, dark and loping across the pavement to him. “Alright?”

“Yeah,” Sirius says, immensely relieved as he steps through with Caradoc and greets Moody with a nod. _Yeah_ seems simple, he’s not really okay because he thinks he might be going mad, but _yeah_ is easier to say. “You?”

“Yeah, yeah, ready for tonight. Let’s go find the girls?” Caradoc claps him on the shoulder and Sirius barely notices the tug behind his navel as they step into the club. The music hits him and it feels like he’s back where he belongs, where he _needs_ to be.

Sirius breathes a _big_ sigh of relief, shuddering through his lungs and out of his body in a grateful plume. The main room is full of smoke and swirling lights and writhing bodies like it was that very first night. Caradoc starts towards the bar and Sirius follows, helping the other boy float two trays of drinks along with them as they search for the rest of their little group.

A shower of sparks emerges from the crowd and there’s a call of “Caradoc!” over the music. Caradoc grins and starts through the throngs of people, Sirius hot on his heels. His _friends _are gathered around a table. Lily has her hair in a ponytail high on her head and her dress is flowing from her shoulders and shimmering. Marlene’s lipstick is iridescent and beautiful as she grins, the flowery vines of the sleeves of her top actually swirling and growing around her arms and shoulders when she waves at him. Benjy holds his hand up to wave and catches the tray of drinks Sirius floats to him. There’s a chorus of _hello’s_ from the group and Sirius is grinning ear to ear already as Fabian, his flame-red hair longer and curling around his ears where a dragon claw sat hugging one, piercing the lobe, scoots up to make space.

“Alright Sirius?” Fabian says, throwing his arm around Sirius’ shoulders as his twin dishes out drinks between them all.

“Yeah, good.” Sirius accepts the drink and clinks it against Fabian’s. “Nice earring,” he murmurs as he takes a long pull of his drink—it fizzes gently on his tongue and he can feel it sinking in his bloodstream already—before he looks around through the crowds, looking for Remus.

“Ha, thanks bud. You should let me pierce your ear. The spell I know is practically painless.” Fabian’s grin is wide and his teeth are bright white.

Sirius laughs, rubbing a hand through his hair and scratching at his earlobe. Would it suit him? “Yeah, alright.”

Fabian’s eyebrows shoot up. “Didn’t expect you to agree, mate!”

“Well.” Sirius shrugs. _Why not?_ he thinks, fizzing with drinks. He looks out across the room, looking for Moony, would he be here? Would he like it? “I did, come on then,” Sirius ushers out, turning in his seat and pushing his hair back from his ear.

“Ha, alright. Oi, someone, give me an earring, I’m piercing Sirius’ ear!” Fabian leans across to the group, waving a hand. Sirius watches with a grin as red lipstick girl obliges, unhooking an earring from the handful through her ear. “Cheers Dorcas,” Fabian murmurs (Dorcas, Sirius thinks, finally confirming her name) and then clicks his fingers to summon a flame, running the earring through it. Then he pulls his wand from his pocket and sits forward with a grin. “Alright?”

Sirius grins, turning his head towards Fabian. “Yeah, go on.” Sirius perhaps should be a little nervous, but he sort of thrills with it and clings onto it, feeling like predator and prey again, throwing himself into the unknown and hoping the darkness will catch him.

“_Transpungo_,” Fabian murmurs, with a jab of his wand. He’s right, it’s _practically_ painless, and Sirius doesn’t wince at all (not when he’s used to the Cruciatus Curse) and only grins. It feels a little warm as Fabian puts the earring in, then a moment later he taps his wand against it again. It stings less, so Sirius figures it’s maybe a healing spell but it’s hard to care so much.

“Well? Does it suit me?” Sirius grins, touching his fingers to it.

Marlene wolf-whistles across the table and slides another drink across the table towards Sirius. “Looks good, Sirius.”

Lily produces a mirror from her pocket, along with a handful of orange sweets that she sets on the table with a clatter. “Here.”

“Ooh, Levies?” Benjy throws her arm around Lily’s shoulder, grinning.

Sirius takes the mirror, chuckling at the way Benjy always seems to appear whenever there’s Levies or Pep around—maybe he knows that spell he and Remus did the other night, Sirius will have to ask him, he thinks, before he’s distracted by his reflection. The earring is a gold hoop tucked against Sirius’ earlobe and it catches the iridescence of the lights around them. Sirius grins at his reflection, it looks _good_. He can hide it with his hair maybe, when he’s not here, but that thought doesn’t seem too important right now, because his tongue is fizzing and Lily is dishing out Levies. The edges of the mirror fog a little, Sirius thinks it must be magical for the way the surface of it shifts like water, or maybe it’s his vision.

Fabian nudges him. “See, suits you. I’ll get you a dragon claw, if you like,” he says, grinning. Sirius thinks that might be a step too far and that Walburga might rip it from his ear if she sees it, so he shakes his head instead, lowering the mirror.

For a moment, the barest of seconds, Sirius wonders if he’s already taken a Levie, if he’s seeing things, because _Remus_ is there, leaning over the back of the booth to talk to Lily, holding his hand out for one of her orange sweets. Sirius sets the mirror back on the table and scrambles out of his seat. “Remus.” He leans over and clasps the other boy by the arm, thinking physical contact might help, might stop the Blight he thinks he can feel in his heart already.

Remus’ eyebrows shoot up as he looks over. He seems… sharper than usual, less muzzy, far less blurred than usual, but Sirius isn’t sure if that’s his own perception of the other boy, or Remus himself. “Sirius…”

“I—The other night…” Sirius skirts around the booth and ignores Marlene and Lily staring at him. Marlene catches his hand and squeezes as if to say _good luck_, or to instil some kind of courage in Sirius. He breathes it in, bolstered by it. “You know what I’m going to say, I got pulled away.”

Remus huffs a laugh. “By your Portkey spell.”

“Yes! I know what it is, it’s not a Portkey, I understand it now. It’s a _curse_, but an old curse, old, Dark magic.” Sirius puts his hand on Remus’ forearm, lightly, not trying to dig in at all as much as he wants to keep him here. He wants to stay here, he can’t let the Blight pull him away again.

“A curse?” Remus looks a little interested now, and his hand comes up to Sirius’ side, resting on his waist. His lips quirk sideways and Sirius glances down at them, breathless almost.

“Yeah, an old one, a _Blight_. Pulls me away from the thing I want most.” Sirius slides his hand up Remus’ arm, just wanting to touch him, wanting to be close, keep him close. Behind them, the rest of the group are talking, chatting, drinks, taking Levies, but Sirius only sees Remus, he wants only this boy and nothing else.

“This place?” Remus asks, like it could be the thing Sirius wants, the thing the Blight pulls him away from, when Sirius is stood across from this gorgeous creature with his amber-yellow eyes and that scar over his lip.

Sirius laughs and shakes his head. He doesn’t need Levies, not like this, as he traces Remus’ jawline in the lights (red, blue, green, silver, purple, blue again, red, blue) and steps closer. “No, it only does it when it’s you… just you.”

“I…” Remus bites his lip around a smile then steps closer. “Me?”

“Mhmm.” Sirius leans forward, down just a fraction for the way Remus is leaning against the back of the booth, and presses their lips together. He hopes the kiss, sober, as sober as he’s like to be here, as sober as he’s ever seen Remus, sharper and sturdier than ever, will say everything he can’t say. Remus kisses back instantly, his lips parting, his tongue curling and coiling against Sirius’. He tastes like fizzing drinks and it’s _so_ sweet as they press closer together. Remus’ hands rise over Sirius’ arms and across his shoulders, mapping him with firm fingers like this might be the first time he’s ever been here properly, ever seated so fully in the moment, not unstrung and floating. Sirius hums into the kiss as Remus’ thumb brushes over the new piercing in his ear and Remus makes a noise back, as if he might want to say something but he doesn’t want to—can’t—break the kiss for long enough to speak. Sirius just wants to _devour_ him.

Remus makes another _gorgeous_ noise as Sirius presses him against the back of the booth, heedless of the group, of his _friends_ sitting there because he wants Remus, and only Remus. He nips at Remus’ bottom lip and trails his hands all over Remus, the plane of his thigh, the slant of his shoulder. Their bodies slot together, Sirius’ knee between Remus’ thigh again, like this is how they are meant to be; they fit like nothing else. Remus’ fingers clench in Sirius’ hair and press closer. Kissing him is even better sober, even better despite the lights and colours and the sensations of it all, Sirius can _feel_ everything now.

Marlene wolf-whistles from behind them as Remus strokes his hands down Sirius’ back and into the pockets of his jeans again, his body eager to pick up where they left off days ago. The sound of it makes something _snap_ in Sirius’ mind. Wolf.

“Remus,” he blurts, pulling back from the kiss. Remus tips his head sideways and kisses down Sirius’ jaw and sucks another mark at the angle of it where the other one had only just faded. Sirius presses on his shoulder, spilling over with urgency now he can think straight. He needs Remus to know it’s okay, know it’s _all_ okay and Sirius doesn’t _care_. He’d sort of forgotten until now, remembering their kisses instead, in a sort of far-off kind of way, but now he remembers, and he needs Remus to know. “Remus,” he says more insistently, “what—what you said, the other night, what you told me…”

Remus frowns. He’s breathing hard and he untangles his hand from Sirius’ hair. “What?” He asks softly, like he doesn’t trust his voice.

Sirius isn’t sure what he means, surely he doesn’t spill a thousand secrets a night to wizards he dances with and kisses in the courtyard. “About…” Sirius leans in, wanting to keep that secret, and presses his mouth to Remus’ ear. “That you’re a werewolf.”

Remus goes stiff against him. The hands in Sirius’ back pockets slide up to his sides and push him away. His eyes are wide like dinner plates when he looks at Sirius and his moonlight skin is even paler, his expression pallid. Sirius can practically _see_ the panic on his face. “Wh—I… I told you that?”

“Yeah.” Sirius nods, watching the horror unfold over Remus’ face and feeling it settle like iron in his own stomach. “Yeah, after that spell—” Sirius reaches up and touches between Remus’ brows where the other boy had tapped that spell. “I said I did—”

“Shut up.” Remus practically _snarls_ and Sirius frowns. He doesn’t like being told what to do, especially not being quiet, and not in that tone. Remus pushes him back and Sirius digs his heels in.

“No, you told me and it’s _fine._ I don’t ca—”

Remus shoves him _hard_ and Sirius stumbles back, surprised by the smaller boy’s strength. He probably shouldn’t be surprised, after reading everything he has for the past two days. Everything in the Black family library is about discovering, identifying and killing werewolves, but Sirius can read between the lines—he’s smart, smarter than he lets his parents know—and he knows now that there are some elements of lycanthropy that bleed over even when the moon isn’t full. Remus is likely to be a little stronger, a little faster, and those alluring amber-yellow eyes of his grow even more yellow in the full moon. Sirius knows he’s likely to hurt, knows the transformation is awful and the cells at the Ministry are barely a few feet wide, just enough to be considered on the border of humane (he’d dug through old newspaper articles for that, glad his father never throws anything away).

So that’s why Sirius catches himself when he stumbles and lurches forward to grab Remus by the wrist as he tries to storm away. “I’m not letting you—”

Remus shoves him again. “Go away Sirius, shut up. I know you’re—you’re just going to use this. I know you Purebloods, here to use the _half-breeds_ for your enjoyment and when you don’t want to deal with the consequences you just fuck off. I’m surprised—” Sirius grabs his arm and hauls him back and Remus _growls_— “fuck _off_, I’m surprised you even came back. Are you just rubbing my nose in this? Going to turn me into the Ministry for being out here?”

Sirius shakes his head like there’s water in his ears. He’s tripping after Remus as the other boy shoves his way through the crowd and tries to shake Sirius off, but he’s following, holding tight because he won’t let this go. He has the Blight pulling them apart and he won’t let Remus pull either. “You don’t know what you’re talking about. That’s not it.” They stumble through an archway into a long hall where a privacy charm prickles and makes Sirius’ ears pop. He’s suddenly shouting to be heard of the music that’s no longer needed but he can’t lower his voice because Remus thinks _that_ of him. “That’s ridiculous. I—I don’t care about what you are, who you are. I just want you. The moonlight doesn’t scare me.”

Remus scoffs and keeps walking. “Leave me alone, Sirius. You don’t know. I bet your stupid Portkey curse doesn’t even exist, it’s just an excuse.”

Sirius shoves him then, his blood _boiling_ at the insinuation he is making up the thing he hates most right now. He keeps his hands on Remus’ chest and holds him against the wall so the other boy has to struggle if he wants to keep running away because Sirius won’t let him run. “Don’t you fucking dare say that. I have been trying to get back to you every time this fucking Blight pulls me away. You’re the thing I want and it’s keeping me from you no matter what I do. I don’t _care_ about you being a bloody werewolf so don’t hang that over me.”

“Shut up. You don’t know what that means.” Remus’ hands come to Sirius’ shoulders, pushing a little but Sirius pushes back. They’re so close, Sirius crowding Remus against the wall to stop him running away, to keep him here. He needs to keep a hold of him, else the Blight will swoop in. He doesn’t think it can take effect when he’s holding onto Remus, the magic isn’t strong enough to pull them apart like that.

“I don’t need to. I’m listening to the magic here, Remus. The Blight pulls me away from you, and—” Sirius swallows hard, he doesn’t know why he’s spilling this but a secret for a secret, eye for an eye, heart for a heart— “it’s love it’s keeping me from. She says I’ll never find love and that’s what the Blight does, what it’s _doing_, but I found you.” Sirius slides his hands up Remus’ chest, over the column of his neck and climbs his fingers into Remus’ hair. “And I’ll keep finding you, every time. I’ll find you every time it pulls me away and I’ll keep coming back to you…”

Remus sinks against the wall, his hands on Sirius’ shoulders loosening a fraction, pulling him closer. “You don’t know me.”

Sirius shrugs one shoulder and Remus’ fingers slip to his neck. “I can get to know you. We can figure this all out. It’s… _the moon_ is better received now than it was in the 90’s, right? There’s more for you, I mean, Merlin, I think my father just has Wolfsbane ingredients lying around, and I’m bloody good at Potions. There are things we can do.” Sirius thinks about the books, about werewolves and other wolves, packs of animals and imagines himself there too. Animagi are a thing. Mrs. McGonagall is one. She could teach him. Sirius grins, he can’t help it, at the idea of being able to help Remus. “I’ll become an Animagus, I’ll find a way. I’ll… I’ll always find a way.”

Remus is looking at Sirius like he’s grown three heads and is speaking Goblin. Sirius laughs at his expression because he’s _found_ Remus and he’ll keep a hold of him, every time. He trails his fingertips across Remus’ cheek and the other boy leans into it. “You’re fucking mad…”

Sirius laughs more at that. He probably is, but madness has brought him here. “And,” he continues, pulled along his train of thought, still tracing the planes of Remus’ face, “and there has to be a way to stop the Blight.” There has to be, because if there isn’t Sirius might scream, so he tries to remind himself there must be _something_ he can do. “I want to keep finding you, every time. I dream about you in the moonlight.” He traces his finger over the scar at Remus’ lip and Remus turns his head to nip at the pad of his finger.

“You do?” Remus murmurs, his fingers circling on the back of Sirius’ neck, through the loose hair there.

“Yeah,” Sirius whispers, leaning closer because he _has_ to taste that scar. “Filthy, wonderful things.”

Remus chuckles and hauls Sirius closer, fastening their mouths together in a kiss. Sirius responds immediately, pressing close in the dim light of the hallway, ignoring the other people walking past them. Sirius licks into Remus mouth, tasting that scar tissue, tasting his fizzy drinks, the indescribable taste of Remus’ mouth that he hungers for no matter what. Remus tangles his fingers into Sirius’ hair and slots their bodies together, his knee between Sirius’ thighs this time so they can sink together. Remus’ tongue coils back against Sirius’, chasing for a moment, and Sirius hopes Remus will always chase him, hopes they will always find their ways back to each other, no matter how far, how long. Sirius will run barefoot through all of London for this.

“Merlin…” Remus breathes, letting his head tip back against the wall. Sirius wants to keep tasting him so he trails his mouth, emboldened by the talk of moonlight, by talk of it all, down Remus’ jaw and to his neck. He tastes like moonlight too, even without that spell, without his mind spilling over, and Sirius can’t help but sink his teeth in, a soft groan issuing from his mouth.

Remus’ hands run across Sirius’ shoulders then down his arms. The other boy squeezes his wrists for a moment before he takes both of Sirius’ hands and laces their fingers together even as Sirius tongues over the red little mark he’s left on Remus’ neck. “I’ll… I’ll find you. I’ll hold on and if you go I’ll find you again. Here every night looking for you. I think about you at the moons too, remember you and it… hurts less.” Remus squeezes their hands hard. “I… keep coming back to me. Please.”

Sirius pulls back so he can see the stark honesty he hears in Remus’ voice painted on his face. It’s dark in the hallway but Sirius can see him so clearly, his amber-yellow eyes watching carefully. “I’ll come back. Every time.”

Remus nods and keeps a hold of Sirius’ hands. “Can we go find somewhere? I wanna… I wanna know everything about you. I wanna sit and kiss you and know everything about you. I’ll hold on.”

“Yeah. Yeah I want to know everything.” Sirius steps back just enough, reluctantly dropping one of Remus’ hands so they can walk. Sirius takes the lead this time, starting for a door at the other end of the hall. It’s busier now, the club filling up the later it gets, the music louder, the drinks stronger, the people rowdier. Remus’ other hand is holding onto Sirius’ wrist like a safety catch, holding so tight.

That door at the end leads to a staircase, narrowing and winding downwards and through the bannisters Sirius sees some clustered seating, quiet enough for conversation, and starts down the stairs, Remus so close behind him he can feel the other boy’s hot breath on his neck.

Behind them, the door flies open and a group fling themselves down the stairs, pushing past Sirius and Remus on the narrow pathway. There’s five or six of them at least, barreling past and cheering something Sirius doesn’t recognise but one of them, broad-shouldered, tall, taller than him, knocks into Remus on the way past. The other boy loses his footing and one of that group rights him with a quick _sorry mate!_ but Sirius is caught up with the rest of him and his hand is wrenched from Remus’ at the abrupt stop.

“Shit, no, Remus!” Sirius calls, twisting a little. He loses his own footing then, in his haste to turn around and grasp Remus again and he stumbles. Remus’ face is pale like moonlight halfway down the stairs and he’s scrambling forward to grab Sirius but Sirius can _feel_ the Blight in his veins.

“Sirius!”


	9. Chapter 9

When Sirius’ knees hit the floor it’s pavement, it’s flagstones and the night air is cool and the sunset is licking at the horizon. Sirius whips around and he’s at the foot of some narrow staircase and his knees _hurt_. Fuck, Merlin dammit, they had tried so hard. There’s no point going back to _Destination_ now, not with how close it is to the sunrise, and how far away he might be. He looks around, trying to regain his bearings and hating how familiar this whole procedure feels now. How many times will he have to do this? How many times will he end up somewhere he doesn’t recognise, torn away from Remus? He’s at London Bridge, he realises, and it’s thankfully not too far from Grimmauld Place, but Hampstead is a few hours walk and it’s already too close to sunrise, dammit.

It’s quiet enough this early that Sirius can shoot a quick healing charm at his sore knee before he starts back up those steps towards Grimmauld Place. He needs to find a way to stop the Blight in its tracks, because surely _something_ must be stronger than the hate burrowing in his veins. Sirius thinks hard, hands shoved in his pockets as he trudges back to the place he used to call home but now it can’t feel further from it.

He thought _finding_ love might break the Blight, but he’s done that; he told Remus about the Blight, said he would hold on, that he would always find a way back, but that did nothing. The Blight still pulled the rug from beneath Sirius’ feet. For a moment Sirius thinks of Unbreakable Vows. He knows how to do them, he’s seen enough, with Cousin Cissy and her husband, Cousin Bella and hers, betrothed as soon as they were old enough. Sirius’ mother had tried to put one on him, for him and Capella, but he had refused. The memory is a little hazy with the Cruciatus and Imperius that swiftly followed, but Sirius had said something about wanting to get more involved with his father’s business, to show Uncle Ignatius he’s _worthy_. Sirius is sure that if an Unbreakable Vow wasn’t impossible to do under the Imperius curse he would’ve been betrothed to her already. It’s all the small mercies, he thinks. An Unbreakable feels like it might work for a moment, before Sirius decides it seems a little excessive; he’s seen what trying to go against an Unbreakable does. Death isn’t pretty that way. Not that he has any intention to leave Remus—he wants to be back with him already—but the wording would have to be so specific the risk might not be worth it.

Maybe he’s onto something though, a Blight is hatred and spite and vitriol; it’s Blackness and everything _wrong_ in the world, so maybe something _light_ and bright and beautiful will stop it, rip it out of him. That’s Remus, he knows, bright-beautiful moonlight, but how can they make this work? It’s not feasible to just hold hands the whole time, is it?

Sirius pauses as he walks past the Owl Office on Upper Street. It’s not open yet, but maybe Sirius can hang around until it is and send a letter to James. He’s due back today or tomorrow, Sirius thinks, but he can’t quite remember what day it is, so maybe that’s not right. The clock outside tells him it’s just before 6am and he doesn’t quite think he can stand here for two hours with the way he’s aching all over and he’s so damn tired. Weeks of not sleeping are starting to catch up to him. Weeks of running after Remus, chasing him through the maze of rooms at _Destination_, trekking over London after the Blight spits him out in some Merlin-forsaken corner, are starting to wear away at him. Maybe it’s the rush of the night, his argument with Remus, his confession, _Remus_’ confession, but Sirius is so fucking tired. He can barely _drag_ his feet along Grimmauld Place and up the marble steps of Number Twelve as they slide into existence.

It’s early enough, Sirius tells himself, through his weariness, to just slip through the protection spells unnoticed. Mother will be asleep this early, especially if she was with Aunt Druella last night, and Sirius can crawl into bed for a few hours. He might dream of moonlight, if he’s lucky. The protection spells are easy to unwind, like always, and Sirius rubs a hand over his tired face as he opens the door just wide enough to slip through.

Orion is in the entryway, just turning away as Kreacher takes his travelling trunk upstairs. Walburga is next to him, in robes despite it being early, looking put together if a little pale. Both of Sirius’ parents turn to see him at the doorway and Sirius’ stomach drops. In tandem, their eyes sweep over Sirius, his leather jacket, his loose hair, his hands in his pockets. _Shit_, Sirius forgot his father was coming home today.

A weary sigh spills from Orion’s mouth, like all of the disappointment festering inside of him for years and years has poured out, with Sirius stood in Muggle clothing in the entryway at six in the morning. He puts his hand on Walburga’s shoulder and murmurs something Sirius can’t hear from this far away; by the way Walburga looks at him, the foul light in her grey eyes, he imagines it can’t be good.

“Where have you been?” Walburga says ominously.

Sirius flounders. He can’t say he was running an errand because the elves would do that, he can’t say Father sent him somewhere because he’s only just arrived home. Regulus, maybe he needed to do something for Regulus, but Sirius is so fucking tired he can’t think fast enough. The moment’s pause where his brain kicks into gear is enough for Walburga to sink her teeth into.

“Somewhere disgusting, no doubt. Don’t think I don’t notice you sneaking out, boy.” Walburga draws closer. Sirius doesn’t flinch, she’s already done the worst thing she can to him by inflicting the Blight on him. He doesn’t realise she’s been aware of him leaving, though. Did Regulus tell on him, or did she notice herself? Sirius feels like his blood is boiling again. How can she expect so much of him? With no support. With nothing he needs. How is Sirius meant to function living in this shell, devoid of love? He can’t do it. He won’t. “I’ve been lenient with you for so long, but this is a step too far. Muggle clothes, coming back in at all hours of the morning. You’re a disgrace to the Black name.”

“Good,” Sirius spits back, trying to pull on the hatred she’s instilled in him, turn it back to her. “I don’t want the Black name. I don’t want _any_ of this.”

Walburga levels her wand at Sirius in one swift movement. “You don’t have a choice. You’ll do what we ask, before I make you.”

“Try it. I can shrug it off, you know. I shrug it off and I sneak out and go to a club full of _Mudbloods_.” Sirius’ skin crawls at the word but it has the effect he wants. “I’ve been going for weeks, and you know, these Mudbloods are better wizards than half of the Sacred 28, better than _you_.”

“How _dare_ you,” Walburga shrieks, and Sirius catches the flare of Crucio-pain quick enough to brace for it so he doesn’t bite through his tongue. His screams echo up the grand staircase and everyone in the house dead or alive must hear but there’s no one coming to intervene. Sirius sinks to his knees as the pain shatters through him in long, terrifying passes that don’t seem to end; Crucio pain is awful, it feels like ice and fire, like pins beneath his nail beds, like screws into his brain and into his joints, a sort of full body pain that, for a moment, he doesn’t want to live through, just to make it stop.

Then it stops and Sirius falls forward onto his hands, panting hard. “I know about the Blight. I know what you did to me.” The confession spills out of Sirius’ mouth, half-laughing with the hysteria of pain, because if he doesn’t laugh he’ll cry and he can’t do that.

Walburga stills and Sirius sees her draw closer from where he’s knelt on the floor. “Pardon?”

Sirius sits back on his heels and wipes his mouth on the back of his hand. “I know. What you did to me. You must know too, what your fucking spite has done to me. I fucking hate you for it.”

Walburga laughs, then. That’s more terrifying than her scowls or her curses or Unforgivables. Sirius stares at somewhere around her knees as she’s stood over him because he can’t bring himself to look upwards. “I did what I had to, to keep the bloodline pure. There’s no use fighting it.”

“No, that’s where you’re wrong. If you think I won’t fight, you’re so fucking wrong.” There’s blood in Sirius’ mouth, he must’ve bitten his tongue anyway, so he spits it out in a glob at Walburga’s feet.

“Up,” Walburga orders, ignoring the bloody spit by her feet. When Sirius doesn’t move she seizes him by the hair and hauls him to his feet. She never usually forces him somewhere bodily, with the Imperius normally, but she knows she can’t lean back on that now. Somehow this is worse. “Come on, hurry up, insolent boy.”

The drawing room that houses the tapestry isn’t used often so there’s a sort of musty smell in the air that crawls up Sirius’ nose. Walburga sets him down in front of the tapestry and Sirius stares at his own name there, _Sirius Black III, _with revulsion rising in his throat.

“Look at this.” Walburga drags him closer. “We have been a pure bloodline since the Middle Ages. Do you know how much magic has been used to ensure things stay that way? Do you know how ruthless your ancestors were? You will be that ruthless too, with your own heirs.”

Sirius tries to pull away from her, imagining the black tendrils of the Blight crawling up the branches of the tapestry, seeping into veins and marrow, in through his ancestor’s eyes, noses, mouths, ears, into their _souls_. “Dark magic,” Sirius retorts, unable to tamp down on the hatred spinning through his voice with the pain and the Blight mixing in his vocal chords. “And I won’t have any heirs. I won’t do any of it.”

“You have no choice, Sirius. Whatever foolish thing you’re entertaining wherever you go off at night, whatever Mudblood bitch you’re sullying yourself with, it won’t go anywhere, it _can’t_. So best to shake it off now before you upset yourself.”

Sirius scoffs, shaking his head. “Mudblood _boy_. A half-breed too,” he asserts, hating the taste of that on his tongue but knowing it’s a necessary evil to rile his mother up.

It works. Walburga glowers, a shadow passing over her face. Her wand is up beneath Sirius’ chin in a flash. “Filth. Dirty fucking blood-traitor. You’re not worthy of the name Black, I should strip it from you.” The light from her wand glows a sickly yellow and illuminates the planes of her face as she speaks. Sirius is still _scared_ of her, but he knows that whatever she does he can get out of. Whatever she throws at him, he is stronger than her; he has things she does not.

Sirius takes a deep breath as his eyes flicker over the tapestry. The Black name. The thing that binds him to every other person on that tapestry, the thing that landed him here. Is it the thing binding him to the Blight, too? Will he able to escape it better, shake it off, win out with love and kindness against the darkness, without the Black name hanging over him like a spectre? With the Black name casting Blackness over the dark tendrils of the Blight. Maybe this is what he needs, maybe this is the way out.

“You can take the fucking family name. I don’t want it.” Sirius holds her gaze for a moment before he steps back. “I’m leaving.”

Walburga raises her wand and the tip of it flares brighter. “You try to leave and I’ll make sure you never seen the sun again, boy.”

Sirius shrugs a shoulder; he _knows_ she hates it when he shrugs, it’s so unbecoming of the Black heir, and that’s why he does it. “You can _try_.”

“You insolent, traitorous, filthy little—_Imperio!_”

It catches Sirius by surprise and he doesn’t have even a moment to prepare, to try and brace himself as his body goes rigid. He can’t even _blink_ without her say so and takes a deep breath, trying to wiggle his fingers against the tight bindings of the curse. He can do this, he can do this. He’s gotten out of her Imperius curse so many times before, he can do it now.

“Up to your room, and you better be thankful if you get out in the next _month_, you filthy little traitor,” Walburga screeches, her wand raised as she bids Sirius’ body to turn on its heel and walk out of the drawing room.

Sirius breathes, and breathes, pushing and pulling at the seams of the curse as his feet drag him into the foyer. The front door is _right_ there, onto freedom and sunlight and _moonlight_; _Destination_, friends, _Remus_. It’s the catalyst he needs to snap the threads of the curse and throw his body towards the door.

Walburga shrieks and a reddish light shoots past Sirius’ head as he _runs_ for the door. The protection spells are up but he can un-knit them in a flash with adrenaline in his veins. He doesn’t even look back as Walburga sends another curse that burns into the wood just to the left of his shoulder with a sickly hiss.

The door pulls open and Sirius runs through it, tripping down the marble steps. He tells himself he didn’t hear a scream of _Avada Kedavra_ as the door swings shut behind him, that he didn’t see the green light at the corner of his eye. His own mother wouldn’t do that, would she? He runs along the street, up towards the main road, just in case she follows him, in case she tries to pull him back, Statute of Secrecy be damned. Sirius keeps running, his heart in his throat, his mother’s cry of the killing curse on repeat in his head.

At the Owl Office on Upper Street Sirius storms to the counter and writes a hurried note.

_James,_

_I ran away. I’m not going back there. When are you back from your holiday? I don’t know where you’ll write me. I think I’m going to go to the Leaky, or Gringotts. I’m not sure where, please write when you get back either way. Not sure where I’m going to stay, but I won’t go back to that house._

_I’m going to Destination tonight, and tomorrow too, and the day after._

_Sirius_

He practically flings the Sickles at the clerk and hopes the Owl Office deliver on their same-day promise. At least tonight he can go to _Destination, _but soon enough he’ll need somewhere to sleep. He doesn’t have _anything_ with him, but he’s sort of working on adrenaline only, and a strange light hope that he is finally _free_. Sirius uses a handful of Knuts from his pocket for the Floo fee to the Leaky Cauldron and makes a bee-line through Diagon Alley for Gringotts.

He’s there when it opens and hopes he can get to the Black vaults quicker than his mother can strike his name from them. The goblin at the counter gives him a toothy grimace and shakes his head—_access denied_—before shooing him away. _Shit._ Shit, what is he going to do? He goes back to the Leaky and sits in the corner, emptying his pockets out onto the scratched wooden table. He has ten Galleons, seven Sickles and a handful of Knuts. It won’t last that long out in the wide world and Sirius doesn’t really know how he’s going to manage. He wishes James were back already, his friend would know what to do.

The fire in the Leaky is warm though, and Sirius tucks his feet up onto the bench next to him to bask in it. Eventually, when he’s sure the barkeep is going to kick him out for not ordering anything, he buys a portion of chips and a hot chocolate laced with Firewhisky, picking at them as he sits in solitude. The barkeep gave him a strange look for Firewhisky that early, but Sirius doesn’t care, he wants something warm in his stomach, the soothing hum of fire. People around him are coming and going, meeting friends or family, laughing and joking. Sirius feels separate from them, his mind whirring with the fact he’s _left_. Walburga has struck him from the names on the vaults, and his portrait on the tapestry is probably a smouldering burn mark by now. A sort of disbelieving, almost manic laugh bubbles out of Sirius’ throat and he stifles it into his plate of chips at the whole absurdity of the situation.

What is he now, if he’s not Master Black? He’s Sirius, no last name, no heritage, no Pureblood ideals, nothing to be beholden to now, except the moonlight, to _Destination_, to his friends there, to Remus. Sirius fishes the coin from his pocket and turns it over in his palm. The map still shows yesterday’s location, up in Hampstead. Perhaps it only changes closer to opening time, when the sun is past its zenith and descending. He has to wait, then.

So Sirius waits; sits and waits for a few hours maybe, until the chips left on his plate are long cold and there are only dregs of his hot chocolate left. Every so often he flips the _Destination_ coin in his palm as if that might change the map, but it doesn’t. He feels _free_, but he doesn’t know whether it’s just in his head. He tries to imagine the Blight in his veins, tries to feel it there but he can’t and he’s not sure if that’s because it’s dormant right or because it’s _gone_. He hopes with everything that it’s the second.

The Floo flares and Sirius glances over out of curiosity, perhaps fear, hoping it isn’t his parents or another Black come to drag him back to Grimmauld Place. What he doesn’t expect to see is James Potter tripping out of the Floo and shoving his glasses further onto his nose. He straightens his denim jacket and looks around, then a moment later, spots Sirius and barrels his way over.

“Sirius!” He calls, throwing himself into the seat opposite.

“Ah… aren’t you meant to be on holiday?” Sirius feels a little dumbstruck, frowning at James.

“Got your owl, mate, and Mum insisted we come back and find you.” James peers at him for a moment before he lifts his gaze back to the large fireplace on the other side of the room. Sirius follows his eye-line to see a couple step out of the grate. Even from here Sirius thinks they just _radiate_ goodness and kindness and it sort of hurts to look at. James waves them over. “Sirius,” he says when they are standing at the table and smiling so kindly, “this is my Mum and Dad, Euphemia and Fleamont.”

“Oh… hi. Nice to meet you, ma’am, sir,” Sirius says, nodding his head as he shoves the _Destination_ coin back in his pocket.

Euphemia smiles—Salazar she looks so kind—as she sits in the seat next to him. “Jamie got your letter and we came home. He’s spoken about you so much.”

“What happened?” James says, so quickly on his mother’s heels that Sirius is sort of blindsided by the fact he’s spoken to his parents about Sirius. He’s been _nice_.

Sirius shrugs. He’s not really sure what happened, honestly, just knows he’s not a Black anymore. “I… we argued? I left. She’s… she’s taken me off the access for the Black vaults. I’m not going back.”

“You don’t have to,” Fleamont says, putting his hand on Euphemia’s shoulder. “We’d like it if you came to stay with us, Sirius.”

“_What_?”

James grins across the table. “Come live with us.”

“We might not be part of that silly Sacred 28, but we know Pureblood society well enough, Sirius. Frankly I’m glad you’re out of that family, they’re awful people, and James says you don’t deserve any of it.” Euphemia folds her hands on the table and Sirius picks up on the tightly controlled threads of frustration in her voice. “So you’ll come and live with us.”

“If you want, of course.” Fleamont gives his wife a smile. “We’d love to have you, Sirius.”

Sirius opens and closes his mouth a few times. He can’t quite get over the fact that these two people—people who radiate kindness and goodness and light—want him around. They know nothing of him apart from what James has told them. He looks to James, who is nodding reassuringly. James is a good person. Sirius can see that in him from miles away, and he’s Sirius’ only real friend outside of _Destination_. His parents are good people too, and maybe they can help Sirius be good, help him get away from the Black name hanging over him, like the sword of Damocles, like a guillotine.

“You don’t know me,” he says thinly, looking between the faces of the Potters across from him. They _don’t_.

“We can get to know you. Besides, we’ve spoken to Mrs. McGonagall about you, haven’t we dear?” Euphemia glances to Fleamont, who nods. “She was rather frank about your family, and she’ll be pleased to know you’re with us, I’m sure.”

“I…” Sirius frowns, shaking his head again. “Okay… okay, thank you.”

James throws his hands up in celebration and lets out a cheer. “Yes, come on, let’s go _home_.”


	10. Chapter 10

The Potter household is a cottage in a town on the edges of London. It’s not as big as Grimmauld Place, but every room is filled with warmth and light and none of the furnishing look like they will accidentally (or purposefully) maim anyone who comes near them. The kitchen has a pot of something bubbling on the stove and the sitting room has a big comfortable looking sofa with a blanket thrown over one arm.

Sirius feels a little disembodied as he walks through the house with James and Euphemia. Monty stays in the kitchen with the Potters house elf, Pimmy, to cook something for dinner. James is talking a million miles an hour as they climb the stairs, and again up to the attic, where his room is.

“We haven’t had a chance to do anything with the spare bedroom, Sirius,” Euphemia says as she steps aside for both the boys to come into the room. “So I hope you don’t mind sharing with James for a day or two.”

James’ room is full of Quidditch memorabilia. There’s posters on the wall and a charmed broomstick flying in circles around the light fitting. What must be James’ bed is pushed against one wall, and then on the opposite wall there’s another bed, in the same colours—blue and gold, Puddlemere United—nestled amongst a pile of possessions.

“Yeah,” Sirius breathes when he realises he’s expected to answer, awestruck by this all. His room in Grimmauld Place is black, grey and green, an homage to Salazar Slytherin. Orion told him often that if Hogwarts were still open, he would be in Slytherin, but he’s thankful that place (which sympathised with Mudbloods) is defunct now. This room is full of character and warmth and _things_. “Yeah, that’s fine. I… this is so much.”

James puts an arm around Sirius’ shoulder and hugs him tight. “I think we’ll manage, won’t we?”

Euphemia smiles at them both. “Oh good. Sirius, if you need anything, please say. I’ll leave you to get settled in.”

Sirius watches the woman go down the stairs and leans into James’ arm around his shoulders. He’s still in shock, probably, everything had happened so quickly, and now this family full of kindness and goodness has let him stay. Sirius turns and puts his arms around James’ waist and hugs his best friend tightly, so tight James huffs out a little laugh, but then he realises how much Sirius needs it and just hugs back. It’s quiet in the room and Sirius can hear the birdsong outside, the clattering down in the kitchen, the warmth of the house overtop both of their breathing.

After a few long moments, they separate and sit on James’ bed. Sirius tells him everything; tells him about the Blight, about the curse in his veins, about how it was Walburga’s doing, his research into it, his dream with the black tendrils. He tells James of nights at _Destination_, with Marlene, Lily (James asks so many questions about her, about her hair, what she was wearing, how beautiful she was), Fabian, Caradoc, _Remus_. He flushes bright red when he mentions the other boy, can feel his cheeks heating up as he recounts that night in the room with the sweeping lights, where they’d kissed and danced. Guilt and pain curdle in Sirius’ stomach as he tells of how he’d seen Remus across the room and the other boy had turned away. He tells him of that spell Remus had given him, the one with the dancing colours and beautiful lights. He skips over the way Remus _tastes_—like moonlight, so beautiful—and only pauses for a moment as he decides whether Remus’ secret is one he can tell. But Sirius can’t keep things from James, not when James has offered him a home and a place in the world.

“He’s a werewolf,” Sirius admits as he tucks his thigh against his body and rests his chin on his knee.

James hums and scrunches his nose up to push his glasses back to their place. “Dad’s friend is a werewolf. He brews Wolfsbane for him and he apparently just curls up in his sitting room at the full moon.” He shrugs his shoulders and picks at a golden thread in his bedsheets. “Not a big deal nowadays, is it? Not as much as it was back in the 90’s.”

“Exactly, that’s what I said to Remus!” Sirius grins; he knew James would understand. “Because the Blight kept pulling me away, he thought I didn’t want him, and he thought it was because of that, I think. But I told him we could figure things out, we would find a way.”

“Right, we can do something,” James agrees, then looks across at Sirius with a very earnest look. “You really like him, don’t you?”

Sirius frowns and plucks at his lower lip with his thumb and forefinger. “The Blight is keeping me from _love_, James. It only kicks in around him, only with him…” He reaches up and scratches his earlobe where the hoop earring still sits. “Yeah, I do. I really like him. Even though I barely know him I… there’s just this pull. It’s stupid, I know.”

“Nah, it’s not stupid.” James nudges Sirius’ thigh with his foot. “You have to listen to your heart at times like these.”

Sirius nods, hooking his arm tighter around his shins. “Yeah. I need to go back tonight. Come with me?”

“Duh. Lily will have missed me, of course.” James grins and scrubs a hand through his hair. Sirius groans and James kicks him in earnest now.

“I bet she won’t have even noticed that you’re missing mate!” Sirius cries, laughing as he kicks James back. He’s never laughed like this, he doesn’t think, as he wrestles James and they kick each other. When they roll off the bed from their tussle it resonates through the house with a loud _thud_. Sirius goes very still and waits to here the approaching footsteps of James’ mother, on her way to punish them for making so much noise.

Instead, her voice calls up the stairs. “Boys!” She sounds like she’s _laughing_, not preparing to dish out a Cruciatus Curse to teach them a lesson. “Be careful!”

James lets out a peal of laughter as he slumps on the floor with one arm above his head. “Yes Mum!”

Sirius waits a beat, then two, and then he realises Euphemia _isn’t_ coming up the stairs to tell them off. The only thing he can do is laugh with James, laugh at the freedom of it, laugh at the fact that this is maybe what a real family feels like, without punishments and pain and expectations any higher than _just be good_.

James talks Sirius through the line-up of the Puddlemere A-Team as they sprawl back on the bed. Sirius has never really seen much Quidditch because it was deemed uncouth by his parents but now he can learn all about it. They talk and James says he has a broom and a spare too so maybe tomorrow they can race around the garden—which Fleamont has put lots of privacy charms on, the good kind that don’t gut Muggles when they step over the boundaries—and play with the Kenmare Kestrels branded Quaffle James has.

Eventually, when it’s getting a little darker outside and James is recounting, quietly, softly, the last Puddlemere game apparently from memory, Euphemia appears at the top of the stairs. “Dinnertime, lads. Before you go out gallivanting in London.”

“Oh, er, are we?” James feigns innocence and Sirius thinks it’s best to keep quiet.

Euphemia looks reproachful over the top of her tortoiseshell glasses. “To wherever you went off to before we went away Jamie.”

James smiles. “Oh, yeah. Okay. We’ll be careful though.”

Euphemia waves her hand nonchalantly. “You’re old enough, you’re smart. Come on before dinner gets cold.”

Sirius follows James and Euphemia down the stairs and sits around the kitchen table. Euphemia pours pumpkin juice and Fleamont dishes out spoonfuls of pie that Sirius eats and tries not to stare at it all. He even gets offered second helpings when he inhales the first one and the Potters tell Sirius how wonderful their holiday in Scarborough was. Sirius feels bad that he’s cut their holiday short but then Euphemia pats him on the arm—it doesn’t hurt, there’s no curse—and tops up his pumpkin juice. The Potters are so wonderful and Sirius feels his heart clench. He’s so close to happiness he can almost taste it.

After pie they eat blackberry crumble with custard and Pimmy brews hot tea for them all before Euphemia tells her she’s not needed for the night. Sirius’ fingers are stained purple from the blackberries but Euphemia doesn’t chastise him for it or send a stinging jinx at his hands. They move to the sitting room and Fleamont smokes a pipe whilst Euphemia and James play a game of Gobstones. James teaches Sirius and howls with laughter when Euphemia is sprayed with water from one of them. Sirius is terrified for a moment but then Euphemia laughs too and wipes a hand over her face and that knot of fear in his chest dissipates entirely because he’s _safe_ here.

Sirius is watching the sky getting darker and missing _Destination_, missing Remus, when James leans over and says, “Shall we go?”

“Yeah,” Sirius agrees, plucking his lower lip between his thumb and forefinger.

James hugs Euphemia and Fleamont goodbye once he’s gotten his jacket and given Sirius his from the pegs by the door too, and then Euphemia hugs Sirius too and so does Fleamont. Sirius is still feeling a little bewildered as he stands with James in the hallway and pulls the coin from his pocket. _Destination_ is on the Isle of Dogs tonight, Sirius can see three sides of the Thames and recognise the edge of Canary Wharf—having a good knowledge of London for social purposes drilled into him by Orion is turning out to be useful in the way his parents would hate the most.

Together, he and James take the Floo to the Leaky Cauldron. James sees someone his parents must know in the Leaky and strikes up a conversation of niceties. Sirius shoves his hands in his pockets and stands a little further back in case the man recognises him for a Black and that gets James into trouble. Instead, James is affable and amiable and mentions they’re meeting a friend nearly Canary Wharf. The man—Sirius doesn’t recognise anything about him, no Fawley nose or Rowle hair—mentions he knows a pub with a Floo across from Canary Wharf. James claps him on the shoulder when they leave for the Floo again and emerge in some fancy looking place with the skyline of the heart of business London beyond the windows.

Sirius is _itching_ to get _Destination_ as they step out into the night air and towards the glowing point on the map. James is talking about seeing Lily again after a week but it’s been a night since Sirius has seen Remus and he feels like he’s climbing out of his own skin for it.

_Left, left, straight, right, straight._

The neon doorway appears like a mirage and Sirius quickens his steps with James right behind him. Moody is in the doorway and gives them a curt nod as they go through the double doors into the main room. The whole club seems like a wide-open tonight, and Sirius stays by the door for a moment to look for Remus. That’s all he wants, just to find this boy.

James claps Sirius on the shoulder. “I’m going to find the others,” he says in Sirius’ ear, squeezing his shoulder before he goes off into the crowd, looking for Lily’s fire-red hair or Caradoc tall over the crowd.

Sirius starts through the crowds, peering through the throngs of dancing people. He remembers his first night here, being so awestruck and bewildered, the unfamiliar cocktail of fear and excitement thrilling through him. It’s different now, moving through this place like it’s his home, letting the tides of the people around him pull him through. He’s safe now. He’ll go back to the Potter’s with James after tonight, and now he’ll find Remus and tell him he wants this more than anything, even if they know nothing of each other outside of this place, even if they’re eighteen and young and stupid. He loves him.

At the edge of the main room there’s a few steps up to a sort of raised platform that looks something like a stage. Some girls are dancing there but Sirius stands on the second step and uses it to peer out over the crowd.

“Sirius!”

A voice breaks over the swell of the music and the crowd and Sirius searches for the source of it, knowing that voice. Remus is ten or so feet into the crowd and actively shoving his way through towards Sirius, his amber-yellow eyes fixed on him. He looks _panicked_ almost, sharp and alive and present, so far from that loose-limbed languor Sirius remembers from the first night. He leaps from the steps and slips into the crowd towards Remus, squeezing past people.

Remus seizes him by the shoulders when they’re close enough and hauls Sirius into his body. He presses a kiss to Sirius’ lips, full of passion and warmth, before he pulls back a fraction to speak. “I couldn’t get to you. I tried but I couldn’t get to you. Fuck, you—” he kisses Sirius again, like it’s all he’s been thinking of since they were ripped apart last night— “you just disappeared, like you Disapparated right out of here. I couldn’t get to you.”

Sirius shakes his head, his hands coming up to grip Remus’ shoulders just as hard. He kisses Remus on the mouth, the corner of his mouth, his cheek, the side of his nose. “I know, I tried, I tried to get back. You know I wouldn’t leave you.”

He’s surprised by the vehemence of Remus’ assertions, surprised that Remus _wants_ him as much as he wants Remus. Perhaps the other boy has realised how much this means to them both somehow; this strange weaving together of their beings that Sirius can’t even begin to explain. He doesn’t know quite how he can feel so strongly for this boy he’s spent a handful of hours with but he wants to hold on tight and never let go.

Remus slides his hand down to Sirius’ and laces their fingers tight. “I won’t let you go,” he says firmly, squeezing their fingers.

Sirius feels warmth bloom up inside him at the knowledge the two of them will always find each other. Maybe the Blight is gone now, maybe running away from Grimmauld Place fractured the hold it has on him. He has no intention of finding out tonight, because he has no intention to let go of Remus’ hand in his. They can deal with that another day. They have so many days ahead of them, so many days to learn everything about each other and hold on tight. Sirius won’t let this go. He leans in, squeezing their fingers as he kisses Remus on the mouth, slow and soft. He wants to have all night with him, give him everything, take everything from him, become nothing and everything.

Remus kisses back, his other hand sliding around Sirius’ waist to pull them closer. His hips are moving with the music like the beat of his heart is syncopated with it, all sinuous-slow and beautiful and Sirius moves with him too,their bodies sliding together. Remus’ thumb is feathering across the back of Sirius’ hand as Sirius strokes his tongue over the seam of the other boy’s lips and into his mouth. He tastes like fizzy drinks and Sirius thinks he’ll never be able to get enough of this. Remus combats Sirius’ probing kiss with indolent, soft curls of his own tongue, his hand on Sirius’ waist sliding to his spine to press them closer. Sirius cups the hinge of Remus’ jaw in his own free hand, trailing over his ear and up through to the deep caramel curls of his hair. He’s nothing and everything all at once, no one and someone, floating through the starlight and reaching out to touch the moon.

It could’ve been a lifetime or moments before Remus pulls back, feathering little kiss over the knife of Sirius’ jaw. “Drink?” he murmurs, his thumb over the ladder-rung divots of Sirius’ spine through his shirt.

They go to the main bar and Sirius leans in on his elbow and orders two of the little shots each and two of those fizzy drinks for them. It’s the only money he’s got in his pocket but it doesn’t really matter to him because he’s got the Potters now and that feels like he won’t want for anything because they’re _so_ good. Remus’ hand is still in his as they take their shots, grinning to each other. Remus rests his head on Sirius’ shoulder as he sips his fizzy drink and Sirius feels warm all over; this must be what the stars feel like.

“Oi, Black,” Marlene says, her hair bright blonde and choppy as she floats a tray of drinks up with her wand. “Not coming to say hi tonight?”

Sirius grins and shrugs his shoulder. “Had to find Remus first.” He glances back to the boy glued to his shoulder. “Remus, this is Marlene.”

“Hi,” Remus says, smiling wryly. “We’ve ran into each other a few times, haven’t we?”

Marlene laughs. “You could say that.” She takes a step back from the bar with the drinks floating over head. “Come on, Lily’s got Levies too.”

Sirius leads Remus back through the crowds, follow Marlene as she wiggles her hips to the music. Sirius dances too, because he can’t not when he’s this happy, when he can feel Remus against his back dancing too, shimmying his shoulders and wiggling his hips. It feels like they’ve found everything they’re looking for. Sirius knows he’s eighteen and doesn’t know a thing about the world and this could all come down around his ears in such a short time, but for now, in _Destination, _he’s blissfully in the moment.

At the table, everyone shuffles up to make room for the two newcomers. Sirius keeps a hold of Remus’ hand as they sit down. Across the table from them James sits with his arm around Lily’s shoulders and she’s tipping her head in towards his a little. They look beautiful and happy and Sirius wonders for a moment if that’s what he and Remus look like too.

Lily’s smile is muzzy beneath her glittering lipstick that’s a little smudged around her cupid’s bow. “You found him, then,” she says, lilting and affectionate as she gestures with her iridescent nails—there’s a ring with Snitch’s wings on her finger that flutters beautifully—towards Remus.

“Yeah,” Sirius agrees, glancing to Remus, who is smiling so warm that Sirius feels like he’s sitting next to a fire. “Yeah I found him.”

Remus chuckles, tipping his temple onto Sirius’ shoulder as he trails his thumbnail over the swells and breaks of Sirius’ knuckles. “We found each other.”

A laugh bubbles out of Sirius’ throat at that, as he moves their joined hands so he can put his arm around Remus’ shoulders so Remus’ forearm is against his own chest. They feel tangled together and it’s gorgeous, moonlight and starlight.

The night passes slowly perhaps, slower than it has so many other days, now they’ve lost and found each other, promised not to leave each other alone. They sit and drink, talking with the group like they’ve been friends for years. Remus tucks himself into the haven of Sirius’ arm, holding tight to his fingers and trying to give as much contact between them as possible.

People are in and out of the booth to get more drinks all night but Sirius and Remus stay tucked up together.

“Tell me everything,” Sirius murmurs against his cheek as they watch James and Lily out on the dance-floor.

Remus smiles. “We have all the time in the world,” he says as he sips his drink. “I’m eighteen, live with my parents outside of London. Hope and Lyall.” Remus bites his lip and hums. “My favourite food is jam tarts.”

“I moved in with James today,” Sirius says in reply, watching him, all wild hair, spin Lily around. “My parents kicked me out.” A pause, a squeeze of Remus’ shoulders. “I like jam tarts too.”

“Oh… they kicked you out?”

Sirius shrugs. “Yeah, I don’t care. I’m better without them. I have all the family I need here.”

Remus sips his drink, then tips the rim of the glass against Sirius’ lip too so he can take a gulp of the fizzy drink as it slides through the light spectrum in discordance with the lights around them—red, blue, green, silver, purple, blue again, red, blue. Remus smiles. “Yeah, we all have a place here, don’t we?”

“Mine is next to you,” Sirius replies before he can even think on it, then feels his cheeks flush with that admittance.

“Yeah.” Remus’ smile is bright and even though Sirius hasn’t had anything but drink, no Levies yet—Lily is too busy dancing—he sees all the colours in the world in Remus’ face then, sees the whole world sprawling out for him. “I’m staying right here.”

Sirius leans in and kisses the corner of his mouth, then when Remus turns towards him, kisses him deeper, licking into his mouth, breathing in affection and longing, all things beautiful and so full of goodness and light.

They kiss some more and get up to dance when Lily hands out Levies with tidy taps of her wand in her palm. Sirius has never floated so high before, with Remus’ hand fixed in his, their palms a little sweaty but feeling so light and carefree. Sirius forgets about all his worries and kisses Remus breathless. They spend so long dancing and kissing, trailing their free hands over each other’s bodies, their joined hands cradled against their chests like unfathomable treasure, like the one thing that needs protecting. Sirius slides his hand into Remus’ hair and tangles his fingers through the curls as Remus’ amber-yellow eyes flicker all over his face. Sirius kisses him again because he can’t _not_ and he tastes so beautiful, like molten moonlight.

Remus rolls his hips against Sirius’ thigh and slides his free hand up Sirius’ chest and Sirius thinks about want and desire and the heady tenderness bubbling under his skin, but they’re both too high to do anything other than aimlessly drink and dance and press against each other. They have all the time in the world to do everything else, all the moonlight and starlight to discover each other and be so in love in hurts a little, but for now, they can drink and dance the night away.

Sirius is pressing a kiss to Remus’ knuckles at the end of a slower song when the lights get brighter and the music fades down to nothing. His ears are buzzing with the lack of music, with the bass still thumping through his veins. Remus looks around and blinks blearily like he’s waking from sleeping.

“Must be dawn,” he says softly, his hand still cradled in Sirius’ and his lips pink from kisses.

“I’ve never made it to dawn before,” Sirius replies, letting himself get washed along with the rest of the crowd. They’re moving slowly, trudging towards the exit like they’re not ready to go out into the wide world yet. Sirius’ friends are all around him, James tucked up against Lily, probably dozing, Marlene and Dorcas murmuring to each other as they walk, Caradoc and Fabian holding hands. It’s all beautiful.

Moody stands aside in the entryway, and the neon-wreathed door is wide open now, like an archway the full height of the ceiling, softly lit. Sirius can’t see where they are the for the crowd around them despite his height.

The cool morning air greets him when he steps out of _Destination _into a new day. They’re atop the highest point of Alexandra Park, with the palace behind them. Dawn is peeking through the trees and backlighting the foliage into swathes of pink and orange. The light is creeping closer and closer, morning moving up to meet the revellers as they leave the club. The sight is breathtaking and Sirius pauses, just to the side of the door where his friends are congregating.

Remus’ hand is in his, holding so tightly. He presses his mouth against Sirius’ shoulder as they stand together.

“It’s beautiful,” Sirius breathes with his heart in his mouth, with his soul leaping through his skin with every heartbeat. He made it here.

Remus kisses his shoulder again, looping his free arm around Sirius’ waist. “Where to now?”

“I don’t know,” is all Sirius can reply. He doesn’t know where they’ll go next. But it’ll be somewhere wonderful.

“Pick a direction, and we can see where it takes us,” Remus says with a laugh, throwing his arm in a wide circle. Atop the hill, this high up above London, watching it come to light, it feels like they can go anywhere, do anything, be anyone.

“Yeah.” Sirius nods and kisses his cheek. “Let’s stay here for a moment, watch the sun some more.” He wraps his arms around Remus and lets his gaze drag over the skyline.

He’s made it, and it’s all _so_ beautiful.

Sirius doesn’t know where they’ll go next, he doesn’t think he _cares_ so much. They’ll come to _Destination_ again tonight, together, wound together, because here is where everything begins and ends. Together, they can enjoy all those mornings between.


End file.
